Hard to Handle

by Christine Warren

  Two sharp slaps cut through the air and sent sparks of pale green magic darting through the smoke. One struck his mother, and the second landed on his cheek, the quick bite dispelling his cocoon of apathy like a switch turning off.

  “Snap out of it!” Kylie yelled in an accent slightly different than the one with which she normally spoke. Then she stepped back and giggled. “Sorry, but I have always wanted to do that.”

  Drum rubbed his cheek and looked around. His first deep breath made him cough. “No worries. But what happened? I honestly felt as if I just wanted to lie down and die.”

  “Black magic. A spell that meddles with your mind. Nasty stuff.”

  “Good Lord,” Maddie murmured, drying her eyes and getting unsteadily to her feet. She, too, coughed as she began to notice the smoke drifting up from the ground floor. “That was terrifying. I could see and hear everything going on around me, but it was like I had no control over my own emotions. I’ve never felt depression like that in all my days. And I hope I never do again.” She closed her eyes on a shudder, and when they opened they held a world of resolve. “Now, tell me how we’re going to get my daughter back.”

  Kylie gave her a smile and a brisk nod. “That’s the reaction I was hoping for. But we’ll have to figure it out after we get outside. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s getting a little warm in here.”

  “Of course. Stephen always made certain to keep a rope ladder in each of the children’s closets. For emergencies.” She moved toward the door in the left-hand wall.

  “This way will be faster.”

  Drum spun toward the sound of Ash’s voice. She leaned in through the window, her expression anxious and her braid disheveled. He thought he saw a glimmer of relief when her dark gaze landed on him, but the thickening smoke was making it increasingly difficult to see.

  “They have Maeve,” he said. “They took her.”

  “We know,” Ash said, her mouth thinning into a straight line even as her voice went grim. “We will get her back.”

  He heard Dag’s voice boom from outside. “Out now. Flames are spreading. Human authorities will be on the way.”

  Drum nodded and snapped into action. “Ma and Kylie first. One of you can come back for me.”

  Ash had already taken Maddie’s hands to help her through the window when they heard Dag snickering. She looked at him, and he thought he saw the corner of her mouth twitch. “We will only need one trip.”

  The male Guardian took hold of Maddie with one beefy arm and encouraged her to crawl her hands around his neck. “Your mother is small, and my mate is tiny. I think she weighs less than my war hammer,” Dag said. The rumble in his voice sounded a lot like suppressed laughter. “I could carry two of each female and not notice the burden.”

  Ash met his gaze. “You will travel with me.”

  Drum hesitated. What was it he had thought only a few nights earlier? Wherever this woman went, he would follow. With the last of the black magic gone from his mind, he realized the words still held true.

  He waited while Kylie settled into her mate’s embrace, then stepped forward and reached out a hand to his own. He watched the fire flickering behind her dark eyes, the comforting flames so different from those eating away at his childhood home. The light that burned within Ash was one he could trust, not only with his life, but with his family and with his future.

  “Whenever you’re ready, mo chaomhnóir,” he murmured. “Let’s fly.”

  And she lifted him out into the night.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They flew west and north into County Offaly to a farm a few miles outside of Clonygowan. It was late, but lights still burned in the kitchen when the Guardians touched down behind a hedge and the small group trudged toward the house on foot. Drum spotted movement in the window a moment before his sister Sorcha threw open the door to stare at them in shock.

  “Ma, Drum! What on earth are you doing here and at this time of night? Why didn’t you phone? Is something wrong?”

  Maddie immediately folded her daughter into an embrace and murmured reassurances. He couldn’t be certain what his mother was saying, but he hoped Sorcha was braced for a shock.

  He hated coming here, hated the idea of dragging another member of his family into this mess of evil and madness. He simply hadn’t been able to think of anywhere else to go. This was closer to his mother’s home than Dublin, but he hadn’t liked the idea of leaving her alone in his flat anyway. He had already been attacked there, so the Order knew that if they wanted to find him, they could look for him there. To have them come after him and hurt his mother instead would have been more than he could bear. He needed her to be safe, and here John and Sorcha would be able to keep an eye on her. Also, he had no reason to think the nocturnis were even aware of this place. For the moment it was as secure a hiding spot as they were likely to find. Too bad Drum himself couldn’t stay.

  He brushed off his sister’s questions, deferring them to their mother. Right now he, his fellow Warden, and their Guardians needed to decide exactly how and when they were going to rescue his sister from the clutches of those Demon-worshipping cultists. Hopefully, getting Maddie settled into a spare bed and getting a few basic answers would be better for Sorcha than diving right into the deep end of the insanity.

  She could trust him on this; the water was not even close to fine.

  The others dropped into seats around Sorcha’s roughly hewn kitchen table. They all looked a little tired, a little shocked, and a little worse for wear under random streaks of soot. For a moment no one spoke, so Drum took charge in the tradition of many a valiant Irishman before him—he filled the electric kettle, brewed tea, and finished each cup with a liberal splash from his brother-in-law’s bottle of whiskey. John had always invited him to feel at home.

  He finally slid into a chair and took a bracing swallow from his mug. Then he leaned his elbows on the table and wrapped his hands across his face, as if he could wash away the events he had just seen.

  “I watched them take her,” he said, his voice matching the quiet of the house. Thankfully the children had gone to bed well before he had brought this ragged group to their doorstep. “Tried to stop them, even used magic, but the thing just dragged her away, kicking and screaming.”

  “You could not have stopped them,” Dag said. He spoke bluntly, but his voice held a note of kindness. “It was ghouls. A band of them. Without training, you had little chance. Even experienced Wardens prefer to avoid ghouls.”

  “Oy, Drum, you can’t feel bad.” Kylie winced. “It’s no wonder your magic didn’t stop that. You’ve only had to use one attack so far, and that type of magic isn’t much good against ghouls. Not from what I hear. And I doubt I could have done any better. Wynn and her uncle say ghouls are real pains in the ass.”

  Drum just swallowed more whiskey-laced tea and shook his head. “What the feck is a ghoul?”

  Dag growled. “Cannon fodder.”

  Ash did not disagree. “A ghoul is a human who has been corrupted by the Darkness and is under the control of a nocturni sorcerer. Their minds have been taken over. Completely. They have no personality, no memories, and no will of their own. They can only obey simple, direct orders from their masters, most of which involve standing between the nocturnis and anyone they believe could do them harm. They lack even the awareness to recognize when they have been injured, but will continue to fight with terrible wounds, massive bleeding, even missing limbs.”

  Drum pictured that and felt a wave of sickness. “Jaysus. Sounds like zombies.”

  His Guardian nodded. “There are similarities.”

  “Are they still people, though?” Kylie asked. “I mean, with zombies the convention says that they’re not human anymore. They don’t have personalities or emotions, and they won’t stop trying to kill you until you kill them. I like to think I’ll be okay when the zombie apocalypse hits, because I could knock off one of those stinky behaimeh, no problem, but I don’t know if I could kill a p
erson who was only coming after me because the Order had messed with his mind. I’d rather just end the influence spell, like I had to do with Drum and his mom.”

  The Guardians looked confused until their Wardens explained the spell of despair that had taken over Drum and Maddie until Kylie had sensed the magic and ended it.

  Ash muttered something under her breath before she gritted her teeth and tried to explain. “A ghoul is entirely different from that sort of influence spell. With these creatures, the nocturni does not seek to simply steer behavior along a desired path. He seizes complete control. No, worse than that. He destroys the ghoul’s mind. A human under influence will be freed if the sorcerer dies, because the spell no longer possesses a source of energy to power it. But a ghoul remains a ghoul. Its brain functions only to keep it alive and moving, but the taint of the Darkness that corrupted it takes over the direction of its actions. It continues to attack and kill humans without discrimination. Like those true zombies.”

  “Ech.” Kylie frowned into her tea. “I was really hoping you weren’t going to say that.”

  “That’s terrible enough, but it doesn’t sound like what I saw outside of Maeve’s window.” He thought back. “The thing that took her didn’t really look human. I mean, it had a face and two arms and maybe legs, but it was black as a shadeling, and it had to be flying to have hovered outside the window like that.”

  Dag grunted. “Means it is an old one.”

  Ash nodded. “The longer the ghoul is under the influence of the Darkness, the blacker it becomes. Usually they are destroyed before they reach much more than a medium gray. They also lose their hair, but their nails grow into claws. And because they have no fear, they can climb up a straight sheer surface without hesitation. I imagine that is what they did in order to take your sister.”

  She dropped her gaze and flattened her hands. Drum thought he could actually see a slight tremble.

  “I am sorry,” she said after a moment, her voice very quiet. “I should have considered that the frontal assault might be a ploy to distract us. Once we had guessed at the existence of the hellmouth, I should have conjectured that the Order might attempt to take your sister. I cannot ask you to forgive me, but I swear to you I will do all in my power to bring her back.”

  Drum could hear her sincerity and see the pain in her expression, but her words concerned him most. “Why should you have expected this? What could the Order possibly want with Maeve?”

  Ash’s chair made a terrible grating sound as she jumped to her feet and sent it scraping backward across the slate-tiled floor. She spun around without a word and stalked away to stand beside the window at the far end of the room. Drum watched her go, worry and confusion creasing his brow.

  “Kylie?” he prompted. “Dag?”

  Kylie looked almost as confused as he did, but her mate watched Ash with concern in his eyes. He sighed and turned to Drum.

  “Ash told you what happens if the hellmouth is opened,” Dag said, “but we both hoped you would never have to learn how one is opened. I had thought we discovered it in time to intercept the nocturnis before they could act.”

  Drum listened and found himself feeling increasingly ill. His heart began to beat too fast and off rhythm. He heard a ringing in his ears, and he felt dizzy and off balance. His stomach lurched and knotted, and he thought he could feel himself break out into a cold sweat. When he spoke, his lips felt thick and numb. “Human sacrifice.”

  “Khas vesholem!” Kylie whispered on a breath of horror.

  “It is how they have managed to release those of the Seven they have already freed,” Dag said. “It is the act from which the Darkness gains its greatest power. Likely it is the only way for them to get around the measures by which the Guild has kept the hellmouths closed and hidden for the past centuries. Your sister has the qualities of a very potent sacrifice.”

  Drum abandoned his tea and went straight for the bottle of whiskey. Then, he listened to Dag’s assessment and found himself plagued by a terrible desire to laugh.

  “A curse on your house for making me think about this, let alone say it out loud,” he spluttered, “but I doubt my baby sister, at twenty-four, still qualifies as a virgin, Dag.”

  Kylie winced. “Um, not the qualities he was referring to, Drum. He meant that Maeve is a woman of power.”

  The whiskey bottle dangled from his nerveless fingers. “You mean this is about the fact that she has the Sight? Are you fecking having me on?”

  Dag scowled. “I would never make light of so serious a situation as your sister has found herself in. Power is the only currency of any value to the members of the Order. Everything they do is an attempt to gain power for themselves or their Masters.”

  “It’s true,” Kylie said softly, her gaze darting across the room to where Ash still stood, facing into the darkness beyond the window, silent and trembling. “The potency of a sacrifice comes from the amount of potential in the blood. Virgins, young ones, have a tremendous amount of potential because their fertility is untapped, allowing them the potential to create life. Children are nothing but potential, because their futures are still waiting to be written. And people with gifts such as precognition, like your sister, or clairvoyance, like you, or digimancy, like me, we have more potential than other humans, because we can do things that other humans can’t. We have the ability and the potential to work magic.”

  “Then what the fuck are we sitting around for?” he roared, slamming the bottle of whiskey down onto the table so hard, he felt an offhand hint of surprise that it didn’t shatter under his hand. “Why aren’t we out there rescuing my sister before they put a knife through her throat!”

  “Because they won’t do it tonight.”

  Ash finally turned back to face the others. Her skin looked as pale and gray as if she wore her natural skin, and the black of her pupils and irises had almost disappeared behind the leaping flames that blazed in her eyes. When she spoke, her fangs flashed between her lips, and if he looked at her hands, he could see the claws that had taken the place of her human fingernails. She looked half turned and fully ready for battle.

  “To make the sacrifice tonight would be a waste,” she continued, her voice hard and cold. It reminded him of the way she had sounded the first time they had met, when he had still thought of her more as a statue than as a woman. “The moon is waning. In three more days, it will go fully dark. The new moon. Performing the ritual then, as the point in the cycle when the Light is at its weakest, will generate the greatest surge of Dark energy. And at this time of year, when the barrier between the worlds is at its weakest, the dark of the moon offers an even better chance at opening the hellmouth with a single sacrifice.”

  “Wait, what does the time of year have to do with it?”

  Kylie spoke up, though she still sounded subdued. “Wynn has told me about this, but she said it was part of Celtic legend and history, so maybe you’ve heard it before. According to pre-Christian calendars, the holiday we now call Halloween actually marked a time when people thought that what they called the veil between our world and the world of spirits and monsters and faeries—basically all the things that go bump in the night—was weakest. That’s why they thought that ghosts and all those other scary things stalked around on earth on that particular night. They believed that because of the thin veil, it was easy for them to get to us.”

  Ash nodded stiffly. “Correct. Timing the sacrifice of a woman of power to the night of the new moon, as close as possible to the time when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, will not only guarantee the opening of the hellmouth, but it could generate enough energy to land a large blow on the gate to one of the Seven prisons, as well. Were I an agent of the Darkness, it is the plan I would follow.”

  Drum took in her predatory features (the fangs and claws), her stony expression, and the roaring inferno of her eyes and had a moment to give thanks that this Guardian was not, in fact, an agent of the Darkness. He knew without question that Ash existe
d solely in service to the Light. Not because her race had first been brought forth for that purpose, but because the need to protect and defend the world against those who would destroy it filled up her bones like marrow. She could no more leave a vulnerable human to the mercy of the Order of Eternal Darkness than she could join forces with them herself. Her breath and sinew forbade it.

  She would get Maeve back for him, or destroy the world trying.

  The certainty of it flowed into Drum as if it were a drug injected directly into his veins. He felt his rage cooling and the haze of violent hatred clearing from his vision. Oh, he still hated that his sister had been taken by the Order, still hated what they had planned for her, but he no longer hated every other living thing on the planet for not delivering her back to him like a sacred offering before an angry god. His reason had returned and, with it, his faith.

  Or maybe his faith had never deserted him. He’d been shocked when Ash had fled from the table. It had confused him. His instincts had told him that someone was about to tell him something he very much did not want to hear, and he had not understood why she would not sit beside him while he listened. He had assumed he would have her strength to lean on while he faced whatever terrible truth was coming for him. When she had left to let Dag break the news, he had felt deserted, as if she had abandoned him without a care.

  Now, he thought he understood. She had left because she cared too much. He might have met Ash less than a week before, but didn’t some old adage say that facing combat together forged bonds that could never be broken? Drum felt that.

  He trusted Ash implicitly, and he felt like he knew her better than members of his own family. He knew she was stronger than anyone he had ever met, and the strength he referred to went far beyond the physical. He knew she was loyal and dedicated to her cause, that she viewed her duty not as a job but as a sacred trust between herself and the powers of the Light. He knew she was brave and focused and sexier than the raunchiest corners of his imagination.