“Irena—”
“I’ll wait, Olek. Go do what you must.”
Her agreement didn’t ease the ache in his chest. He watched until she turned the corner, then listened until he could no longer hear her quiet footsteps.
He drew a deep breath, then returned to the conference room. Michael nodded once, indicating that he’d heard Alejandro’s plan to take Rael’s position—and was giving his approval.
The Doyen must have already signed the exchange to Lilith and Hugh. Alejandro couldn’t read Castleford’s face; Lilith regarded him with a bemused expression.
“We should have done this two years ago,” she said.
It was too much. He had Michael’s approval and Lilith’s, when he could not have Irena’s. He could not remain here without breaking.
“If we are finished, I have duties to attend to in Argentina.”
Duties that required Alejandro’s swords to draw blood. He had never looked forward to it more.
“We are.” Lilith glanced at Taylor. “Except you. You’re staying until Savi comes?”
Taylor nodded. “We’ll let you and Cordoba know if we find anything on Margaret Wren.”
At the moment, Alejandro didn’t care if Wren had enslaved Rael with a bargain and had arranged Julia Stafford’s murder herself.
He bowed stiffly and left.
CHAPTER 14
Taylor didn’t smoke often—just often enough that a collection of ash had gathered in the one of the empty flowerpots that lined the small balcony of the second-level apartment she and her mother shared. And just often enough that she knew how slowly to open the sliding door so that it wouldn’t squeal and wake up her mother—who’d come out, see her lighting up, and give her a look. The daughter of a nurse should know better. Did know better. But sometimes didn’t care.
She drank a lot more often.
Tonight, she did both.
She didn’t have a view, except for her mom’s flowerpots—mostly empty for the winter—and the contemporary stylings of a brick wall about three feet from the rail. She glanced down, into the tiny space between houses. Though gates blocked each end of the gap, a vampire could sneak through there, and easily leap up. No vampire was there now. Just garbage cans, a red plastic wagon tipped on its side, and what looked like a beheaded Cabbage Patch Doll.
Fun. The kid living in the house next door was probably someone she’d meet again, in about twenty years. Then again, maybe not. Sometimes they started out bad, and ended up okay.
She took a sip of her red wine—a glass a day kept vampires and heart disease away, so tonight she was having four. She looked up at the dark sky. Just clouds, and a few wires. She didn’t see a Guardian. Somewhere out there, a novice was probably practicing his stalking skills.
Unless they weren’t. Maybe they were like the tree in the forest. If she didn’t see them, were they there? If they were, she didn’t need to raise her voice.
Quietly, she said, “If you’re here, you might as well come have a drink with me.”
She waited. No wings in the sky. No one hopping over the gates in a single bound. Figured. She turned to stab out her cigarette. She hadn’t really expected—
Oh, shit. A large hand came out, covered her wine before she sloshed the contents all over his white linen tunic.
She really should have stopped at just one glass. She blinked up at Michael.
She hadn’t expected anyone—but she really hadn’t expected him. Not the Doyen. And he was the last one she’d have wanted here. Irena might give off mob enforcer vibes, but Michael was the one who scared the crap out of her. Part of it was that he seemed to try to appear nonthreatening, like some kind of guru, but underneath that tunic were ropes of muscle and the chest of a gladiator. Did he think he could hide that? And his bare feet—they were fine, as feet went—but the point was, he obviously didn’t have to go all out with the steel-toed boots or even the soft leather stockings that Irena wore. His bare feet screamed: I could rip apart a demon and I’m not even wearing shoes.
God knew what he could do to humans. And he definitely wasn’t one. All the right parts were in all the right places, but he was built like he was solid stone. And he was perfect. Not beautiful in the way Savi’s partner was, but more like someone had taken Taylor’s idea of masculine perfection and put it in an untouchable, unfeeling form. Like a cosmic joke—except that she wasn’t important enough to bother playing it on.
He released her wine. She couldn’t decide whether to stop now or just throw it all back in one gulp. It wasn’t as if the damage hadn’t already been done.
Enough damage that she told him so. “I’ve had a little too much to drink.”
“Is that why you offered to share it?”
His voice made her shiver. Or it was just the cold. “Yes. I sure as hell wouldn’t have asked you here sober.”
“I know.”
Of course he did. He could probably see right into her head. She forced her head back into work. “Savi got the information on Wren—some of it. Butlers make a hell of a salary, apparently. And Wren is making transfers. Big ones.” She took another sip. What the hell. “But the CIA stuff? It’s not on any computer. There’s a list of records, but not the records themselves.”
Michael nodded. “I will get them.”
“Do I want to know how?”
“No.” He studied her wine, her cigarette, as if looking for the reason behind them. And he nailed it in one. “Khavi visited you.”
“That she did.” With a big smile, she pushed her cigarette out, gestured for him to follow her inside the apartment.
She liked it, mostly. Clean, well-built, nothing fancy. She couldn’t imagine what he thought. She’d seen the paintings of Caelum, including his temple—a huge, Parthenon-like structure of shining marble. A whole freaking temple to himself, with columns and statues, and room enough to fit ten of her apartments inside. Maybe twenty.
Welcome to my digs, Doyen. Behold the luxury that can be had on a cop’s salary, a widow’s pension, and a brother’s medical bills.
She didn’t have to open Jason’s bedroom door—it was never closed. The night-light gleamed off the rails of the hospital bed, the equipment beneath, his eyes. They were open; she hated it when they were open. When they were closed, she could still pretend that when they opened, he’d wake up.
She felt Michael in the doorway beside her. “Can you heal him?”
“No.”
Her chest seemed to fold in on itself. She hadn’t even admitted to herself how much she’d hoped his answer would be different.
“Would you if you could?”
“Yes.”
She turned, walked back out to the balcony. She could do tears. Tears were quiet. But if she got louder, she didn’t want her mom to hear, and wake up, and have that burden, too.
Michael said nothing. He stood quietly beside her, his arms folded over his chest.
After a few minutes, she wiped her cheeks. “After Savi was transformed last year, I tried to get rid of her. Stopped talking to her, e-mailing her. But she was such a stubborn little . . .” Taylor shook her head. “She shows up at the station. Somehow, she’d found out about Jason, and she tried to heal him with her blood—a transfusion.” She swallowed hard. “My mom doesn’t know.”
Taylor wouldn’t give her hope, just to take it away. They’d gone through that too many times already. A small change in his status. A noise that would sound like a word.
And always, it ended up as nothing.
“Transformation would not work, either. There is too much damage.”
“We figured that, and didn’t try.” She stared at the brick wall. “It was just a stupid, stupid accident. He was on his bike. Hit a pothole. His helmet didn’t do what it was supposed to do.”
“I’m sorry.”
She thought he might mean it. But she didn’t want to look at his face and see stone. “Thank you.” A deep breath seemed to clean her out. “I’ve accepted it, mostly. It’s been eight years.”
“Khavi did not help.”
That was the understatement of the year. She lifted her glass to him, finished it off, and said, “So, that’s the painful story of my brother. I hear you’ve got one about your sister. Anaria. What kind of name is that?”
“It is demon, for sun. There isn’t one in Hell.”
“Where does the light come from, then?”
“Pain.”
Jesus. That sounded like a joke, except she thought he wasn’t kidding. Was he?
Michael sighed.
Michael. “Your name isn’t demon.”
“No. I was named after a friend of my father’s.”
She stared at him. “An angel?”
“Archangel. And one of the seraphim. Before the Second Battle, and while I was a boy, they were frequent visitors at my father and mother’s table.”
When his father had been something other than a demon. Something more, or something less? “What were they like?”
“Beautiful. Kind. I loved them.” He smiled slightly. “And I was terrified by them.”
Her mouth dropped open. She didn’t know which shocked her more—that Michael could admit to being terrified, or that something could terrify him.
But she believed him. Aside from that smile, which wasn’t exactly full of joy and amusement, his face didn’t give much away—yet his eyes had become obsidian.
“Why terror?”
“They make you want to serve them. They cannot help it, and they do not intend their effect—yet it is there. And it is why humans thought they were gods. With angels, the line between free will and compulsion is blurred.”
And that alone had frightened him? “Were they very powerful?”
“They could level mountains. They could heal your brother.”
The emphasis in his voice made her guess, “But they wouldn’t?”
“No. Because everything that is not done of free will, is His will. And so they would feel sympathy, offer comfort, but they would not change it.” He paused. “We would.”
The Guardians? “But you can’t.”
“No,” he said. “We can’t.”
“Why would you change it? Don’t you think it is His will—or, or . . . fate?”
“No. It is only chance. If fate determined anything, I would have no reason to be a Guardian. Nothing we did would matter. Free will wouldn’t matter so much—the Rules wouldn’t hinge on it—if everything is left to chance.”
“Even though the angels believe it’s His will—?”
“Lucifer was an angel once. He made a mistake. They might have, too.”
She had to laugh. “That’s one view of the Guardians that I haven’t heard before. Not better than angels—just a little more willing to admit their mistakes.”
“Yes.” He smiled again, and the intensity of his look deepened. “Would you become one of us?”
Would she? “Yes. But probably not for the right reasons,” she admitted. “I’m too much of a coward to die.”
His obsidian eyes seemed to absorb the light. “So am I.”
Even with the door standing open to the frigid tundra, the forge was too hot. Irena had fed the furnaces too much before she’d left, and returned to stifling air that wrapped her in a suffocating cocoon. Each crackle from the hearth fire exploded in her ears. She couldn’t push the heat out.
But she could shut her eyes against the firelight. A tall iron block stood before her, and she ran her hands down the smooth sides. She made her mind as shapeless, emptying it of images and concentrating only on her emotions.
She focused. Her Gift gathered her emotions and shoved them into the iron, sculpting the metal without her direction.
Irena stepped back and looked. This one was uglier than usual, pitted and misshapen. Spikes grew out of irregular lumps, as if a warty boar had belched cactus spines. Twisting iron ropes with razor edges surrounded dark hollows. She circled around to the back, found a semi-transparent tendril curling over a spike. She flicked her fingernail against it, listened to the clear chime.
Smiling, she continued her circle. She never knew what to expect, or what to make of these sculptures. She’d discovered her Gift this way, in an outpouring of strong emotion. Practice had lent her control, until she could form an eyelash from steel. Within three hundred years of her transformation, she’d been able to manipulate metal into lifelike movement, a skill she’d taken great pleasure in.
Yet these mindless sculptures pleased her almost as much. Seeing them always lightened her mood. She’d long thought that her method of creating them was not much different than drifting. Guardians didn’t sleep, and most cleared their minds of emotional and psychic buildup by meditating; Irena cleared hers in one push of her Gift.
Despite the similarity of method, however, the sculptures unsettled most other Guardians. Several times, she’d put a selection in the courtyard near her quarters in Caelum so that she could see them as she came and went, and she couldn’t help but notice the unease with which Guardians—young and old—had skirted around them. She’d heard their theories about her emotions and state of mind—almost all which had pushed her into laughter. The sculptures she made in her best moods were just as ugly as when she was angry.
Alejandro was one of the few who knew that. It had only been a week before their encounter with the demon, she remembered. They’d spent hours arguing over an essay about nature and beauty that he’d found in Caelum’s library and read aloud to her here. Olek had been in agreement with the author; Irena had not. It was that simple, but afterward, Olek had stalked from one end of the forge to the other, reading the essay again—probably looking for a point he could use to sway her. Irena had not minded; the sight of Olek, stalking and determined, had been worth watching.
Until she’d realized that the hungers she’d buried were being uncovered with his every step. Then she’d formed her iron block, blanked her mind, and shoved her emotions into it.
She’d felt Olek’s astonishment when he’d turned to see what she’d created. He’d examined it from every angle, then looked at her.
With a hint of laughter around his eyes, he’d said, “This is not anger.”
No. Her Gift stripped her emotional shields, and he’d felt everything she’d put into the block of iron: her contentment, her desire, the deep pleasure of being here with him.
Of course, he’d thought she’d been making an argument of her own.
“I see your point,” he’d said. “When there is no will to shape an object, then the only meaning it has is what the person seeing the sculpture gives to it.”
She’d been about to remark that his conclusions also said more about him than about her sculpture, but then he’d added, “And when your will shapes the metal, the result is nothing but what you intend it to be. All of those statues of me—they are just that: me. No one could mistake them for anything else, or read any more meaning into them.”
She could not answer then—she had been laughing too hard. If anyone with eyes looked at the statues she’d made of him, they would know instantly how beautiful she’d thought him. How every plane and angle of his body had become a new landscape to explore beneath her hands. How she had fought to understand why the tightening of his fingers had so many meanings, in what combination his brows and eyes and lips would tell her what he thought. It was all there, in each sculpture she’d made.
Olek hadn’t seen it, but he’d never seen himself as she did. She’d laughed as he declared that she’d misunderstood his arguments. And he’d finally tossed away the essay, and invited her to spar with him, instead.
That had been a memorable day—one of many memorable days with him, in a life that had grown very long and the years indistinguishable.
Irena sighed and returned to the front of her latest sculpture, running her fingers over one of the ridged bumps. She missed those days almost as much as she treasured them.
And it had been so long since they had fought so well together. She wanted to recapture it
. . . but once again, she had no idea how to move forward. If he would take a demon’s role, she didn’t see how it could be done.
Icy air touched the back of her neck. The forge had finally cooled. She walked to the open door and stopped, shielding her eyes and looking out over the windswept snow.
In the brilliant midday sun, the plain shimmered a blinding white. Half a kilometer distant, three figures trudged through the snow toward her forge. Two men, one woman—each dressed in a bright, bulky coat, synthetic pants, and heavy boots that told her they’d come from a city.
A psychic probe confirmed they were human. Irena searched the horizon behind them, but didn’t see any vehicles. They’d been traveling for a while, then.
One of the men lifted his arm. Irena waved, then headed back inside.
Unease prickled at the back of her neck. She paused, glanced over her shoulder. Another psychic probe confirmed the first: They were human.
It wasn’t the first time travelers had stopped here, whether lost or simply heading through. Reindeer farmers moved their herds across these plains during the summer, sometimes camping within a stone’s throw of her forge. There had been tourists, surveyors. She’d never turned anyone back.
She would, however, be careful.
With a mental pull, she called in her pantry from her cache. The fifty-year-old bread would still be fresh, and there were enough canned goods to feed the three humans for a week, if necessary. She set the rustic table near the central hearth, called in an aluminum hip bath and a stuffed tick mattress piled high with furs.
When she was done, her forge looked like the home of an eccentric sculptor who lived very simply. She’d learned years ago that calling herself an artist provided unspoken answers to many questions about her lifestyle.
She returned to the door and looked out. They were making good time. Her unease began to crawl down her spine.
Inhospitable or not, she didn’t want these people in her home.
Without giving herself a chance to reconsider, Irena formed her rabbit-fur mantle over her shoulders, and walked out to meet them. If she had to, she would carry them back to civilization.
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