Warders, Volume One

by Mary Calmes

  I leaned forward, put a hand on the back of his neck, and pulled him close to give him a quick kiss on the mouth. When I stepped back I saw how huge his smile was.

  “So, we’re gonna go eat,” I said simply.

  “Okay.” Cash smiled wide, offering Ryan his hand.

  “Cash,” Ryan said, clearing his throat, taking my partner’s hand but having trouble looking away from me. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “And you.”

  “You ready to go eat?” I asked Ryan. He nodded like he was in a daze. “Thanks for being here like you said ya would.”

  “You don’t have to thank me for that,” he said seriously, looking me straight in the eye. “That’s a given.”

  “So, hey,” Cash said, grabbing hold of Ryan and me, one of his arms draped over each of our shoulders, “you like Mexican, Ry?”

  He turned to look at Cash. “I do.”

  “Great,” he said, leaning on me, “’cause Jules and I have a favorite place.”

  “Well, then, take me.” That he wanted to be included, that he liked Cash, meant a lot. “I can’t wait to see Phoebe again.” And I saw Cash’s smile, the real one, because Ryan was crazy about the person Cash loved more than anything in the world.

  “I think this is gonna work out just fine,” Cash said, giving me his blessing as he dropped his arm off me when we reached the elevator.

  He didn’t let go of Ryan, and that was nice. When Cash liked you, he touched you. It was the way he was raised. I liked him liking Ryan.

  I got stuck sitting in the back of Ryan’s Jeep, and when we stopped at Cash’s condo, we had to wait outside for him to collect his wife. Over the phone, Phoebe had forbidden Cash from bringing Ryan in. Once the place was immaculate, he could visit.

  “You know we didn’t have to do this tonight,” I told Ryan from the backseat.

  He turned around to look at me. “Are you kidding? Your partner, his wife… are you high?”

  I smiled at him. “I’m not following you at all.”

  “Oh, man, c’mon, that’s gravy. Women love me. I mean love-love-love-love-love me! So once Phoebe is crazy about me and after that little display a second ago—I’m golden.”

  I grinned at him.

  “Don’t look at me like I rode the short bus to school. I’ve got this wired.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “You just kissed me where you work in front of your friend. No one has ever done that before. I could never be around long enough to… and you—you didn’t even think about it; you just did it, like it was the most natural thing.”

  I shrugged. “I guess I’m not getting the significance.”

  “No, you’re not, but that’s okay.”

  “Ry—”

  “Last night when I was with you and your friends and your boss, and then just now… why was I even worried?”

  “Why were you worried?”

  His eyes were locked on mine. “You don’t get it right now, but you will.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head, his bottom lip trembling. His eyes, I noticed, were sparkling in the light. “So you wanna maybe gimme a kiss? I missed you today.”

  I patted my thighs. “Come sit in my lap.”

  “Don’t tease.” His eyes narrowed in half.

  When I leaned forward, he met me eagerly, his lips parting under mine, my tongue sweeping inside his mouth, tasting him. Phoebe’s greeting made me ease back, and I smiled against his mouth when he leaned with me, whimpering, wanting to prolong the contact.

  “Julian,” he breathed, his eyes unfocused like he was drunk.

  “I missed you too,” I told him.

  It was nice that just my words made him catch his breath. I could get used to Ryan Dean wanting me.

  THE STROLL after dinner was nice. As I walked beside Cash toward the ice cream parlor at midnight, we looked ahead at Ryan and Phoebe, arm in arm, whispering, leaning against each other as they walked. The way Phoebe looked up at him, the way he tilted his head down to listen to her, it was nice. They had instant chemistry, and they both liked chocolate ice cream with strawberries. It was a very good night.

  Ryan drove me home and got out, grabbing my laptop bag from the back seat, slinging it over his shoulder. I noticed that he had a small duffel as well.

  “What’s that?”

  “My clothes for the morning.”

  “You just assume you’re coming up?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said quickly, his smile wicked. “I’m sleeping in your bed tonight.”

  My apartment was a cluttered mess compared to his, but in a lived-in way, not in a scary, reality TV kind of way. And with a few hours’ work, it always looked good. He liked that the floors were wood, that I had only a radiator for heat, that I had a hurricane lamp in the living room, and that there were framed pictures everywhere you looked. The black burlap couch in the living room, vintage bullfighting posters on the walls, the exposed red brick wall by the front door, the mermaid mural I had painted in the bathroom, the Chinese lantern in my kitchen, the hammock on my fire escape, my black teak wood furniture… he told me he liked all my things. He sat in the rocking chair that used to belong to my grandmother, an Adirondack chair that never ceased to look out of place, and took a look at my computer.

  After a moment he rendered his verdict. “It’s a Mac. Who owns a Mac?”

  “Us creative types,” I teased.

  He looked at all the framed photographs on the shelves with all my books, checked my fridge’s inside for food and outside for more photos. I had several pictures of my brother Frank, my folks, Cash and Phoebe, and all my friends’ kids, and postcards from my ex-boyfriend Evan, who was backpacking through Europe. There were clippings and my horoscope and a recipe for pot roast that I hadn’t gotten around to trying, and everything was held on just barely with poetry magnets. If you slammed the door too hard, things always fell off.

  “You know you’re supposed to create haikus and sonnets with these words. You’re not supposed to just use them to keep stuff up.”

  “How’s a haiku go again?” I asked.

  He laughed and continued his walk-through. “You have more stuff framed than anybody I know. What is this?”

  I walked up behind him, looking over his shoulder. “Oh, it’s a doodle my friend Melina did on a Post-it note.”

  “And it’s framed?”

  I defended it. “It’s a good doodle.”

  “What’s it of?”

  “You can see it’s a church.”

  “I can?”

  “Sure.”

  He pointed to something else. “And that?”

  “It’s the first leaf I found when I came to the city.”

  “A leaf?” He chuckled.

  “Yeah. I asked for a sign that I was supposed to stay here, and a green leaf fell on my head.” He just looked at me. “A green leaf,” I repeated, so he’d get the significance. “Why would a new green leaf fall from a tree?”

  He smiled at me. “I don’t know, but I’m sure you do.”

  “To show me that my life was supposed to grow here.”

  “It’s not green anymore.”

  “So not the point.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, you’re nuts.”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged, yawning, walking back to the kitchen. “You want something to drink?”

  He shook his head, looking at everything else on my wall. “I love all this crap.”

  “Crap?” I asked before drinking orange juice from the carton.

  “Gross, man, get a glass,” he said, walking out of the room.

  I smiled after him. When I didn’t see him for a minute, I went looking and found him standing in my bedroom.

  “What?”

  “Nice.”

  “Antique brass bed.”

  “I know,” he said, and then he turned to look at me. “Ask a question?”

  “Sure.”

  He pointed at the bed. �
�Why?”

  “I like stuff you wouldn’t expect.”

  “Okay.”

  I shrugged. “I know my place is kinda weird. I—”

  “I love your place,” he said, cutting me off, taking a quick breath like he was nervous “It’s got a nice feel in here. It feels like home.”

  Good that he was comfortable, since my plan was for him to spend a lot of time with me. I told him that, and then I reached for him.

  “Yeah? You wanna spend time with me?”

  “I do.” I smiled at him, and he shivered once as I hugged him to me, my hands sliding up and down his back. “Is that what you want, Ry?”

  The noise he made in the back of his throat, part whimper, part sigh, clutching at me so tight, answered over and over that it was all he wanted. And the fact that he was honest, holding nothing back, made me want him even more.

  I had thought that maybe the first time was a fluke. That so much ease and chemistry wasn’t really possible with a brand-new lover. Usually there was the fumbling and awkward moments of the learning process, getting to know what the other person liked or didn’t. But with him, there was ease right away, and lots of laughter and enthusiastic encouragement. I felt free to just be myself, let him see that I was a big dope, and tell him that everything about him was heaven. And I didn’t just hear him when he said I felt good in his arms, I actually listened. Because when he looked at me, I knew he meant it.

  He had to be close to me. My skin next to his, he said, was a necessary thing. His words were halting, his eyes searched mine, and his breath caught when I kissed him. There was no mistaking that he wanted me, his hands on me constantly giving him away. It was terrifying to think of us being in the same exact place, wanting the same things. I was more excited than I’d ever been. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.

  V

  WHEN I rolled over onto my back on Sunday morning, I was surprised that I wasn’t mauled. I wanted to be mauled, so I opened my eyes to figure out why I wasn’t. The piece of paper cut into the shape of a heart taped to the lamp on the nightstand stood out right away. He had gone to get coffee and bagels and lox and eggs and apples. All this was on the note in his big, fluid handwriting, along with a promise of all kinds of carnal pleasures as soon as he returned. I hoped he was already on his way home. I was getting used to having him around. I was looking forward to a long, leisurely morning when I thought I heard something shatter.

  “Ry?” I called out.

  No answer.

  I raised my voice, making it carry. “Ry?”

  The bang shook my wall, and I gasped. It sounded like something heavy had hit it. A second later, frames rattled loose from their hooks when something slammed against it from the other side. Family photos hit the wooden floor and cracked, sending pieces of metal, frame, and glass in every possible direction.

  Moving fast, I reached under my bed, grabbed the baseball bat there, then rolled to my feet, and charged out into my living room. The second I recovered from my shock, I yelled, “What the hell is going on?”

  Two men held Ryan against the kitchen wall, and two more clustered around them, but that wasn’t the scary, weird, or upsetting thing. The freaky part was their eyes when they turned to look at me.

  They all had eyes that looked like they were filled with blood. And not simply pupils that were red like an anime character, but the entire eye filled with wet, welling gore. It was gross and disturbing and twisted my stomach into knots. Had I not seen it for myself, I would have never believed it was possible for people to be alive and look like that. I had no frame of reference for what I was looking at.

  My intrusion allowed Ryan to twist free, leap up onto my counter, and then dive over the hands that reached for him. I just stood there, frozen, watching as he rolled to his feet in front of me, grabbed the bat from my hand, and turned on the men charging toward him.

  He shoved me back and swung. I had never seen anything like the blur of speed that he was. The leap up into the air and the spinning kick that threw the first man across the room, crashing into the kitchen table, backed me up several feet. The way Ryan moved, fast, inhumanly fast, like a coiled snake, a blur of motion lost to the eye, was terrifying. And when the men fell, they didn’t stop at the floor—but disappeared, as though sucked into the floor that, for just a second, turned into almost an open airlock. I heard the howling wind, saw how fast and hard they were pulled, the suction fierce, their cries and screams drowned out.

  The second the room was clear, Ryan was in front of me. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Jules.”

  I took a step away from him, taking in everything I had just seen, gauging my senses, making sure I was awake, sane, whole.

  “Julian.” His voice cracked as he took a step forward.

  I lifted my hand, holding him where he was.

  “Julian,” he repeated my name.

  My eyes flicked to his.

  “I have to go right now, but I want to come back. Can I come back?”

  I had no idea what to say to him.

  “Please.”

  After a moment, I nodded.

  He winced. “I don’t want to go, but I have to let them know.”

  I wanted to ask a question, the first of many, but suddenly there was thunder in the room. The floor dropped out from beneath my feet. I was standing for seconds before I was falling into a funnel of wind. I was surrounded by sound, like a jet engine, and the air was hot, scalding, burning my skin. I was tumbling, spinning, rolling, terrified of what was going to happen when I stopped.

  Then arms around me, warm, solid, strong, and when I focused my eyes, there was Ryan. Tears were swept from his face, his hair blown back in the gale. He was trying to speak, but I couldn’t hear him.

  “I don’t understand,” I yelled, not even hearing my own voice in the wind.

  He let me go suddenly, releasing me fast, and I was surprised that I didn’t just fly away, instead remaining just as close as we plummeted together. The ringing in my ears that became a pulse of overwhelming sound hit me hard, pounding me into unconsciousness.

  MY EYES drifted open, and when I turned my head, I saw the man… men. There were five of them there, one sitting on the coffee table close to me, the other four standing.

  “Julian Nash,” the man closest to me said.

  I scrambled to sit up, staring at them all and taking in the tailored suits and dress shoes, as well as the fact that none of them were wearing ties. I felt strange there on my couch in only sweatpants.

  “I am Jael,” the man told me, “sentinel of the city. The men with me are Jaka, Marot, Malic, and Leith, my warders.”

  Warders. I had no idea what that was. More to the point, I was actually awake. Really, truly, awake.

  Leaping to my feet, I walked backward until I hit the front door. The cool wood against my back was comforting.

  “Julian,” Jael began, “I—”

  “Jesus Christ,” I gasped, trying really hard not to hyperventilate. “When I woke up before, and I came out of the bedroom and there were-were those things, and-and what the fuck were those things?”

  “Verdant demons,” they all answered at once.

  “Verdant demons, right.” I took a breath, dragging my fingers through my short wavy hair. “Okay, so like I said, the first time I figured, bad chicken or something, ya know? I’m dreaming or having my stomach pumped somewhere, or God knows what, but now—” I looked up, my eyes roaming the room, seeing Ryan first and then the other five men. “Now I’m thinking I’m not dreaming, and I’m awake, and I had demons in my kitchen.”

  “You’re very much awake,” Jael soothed. “And your sanity has not deserted you, Julian Nash. You’re not mad. Sentinels and warders exist to protect man from all the creatures from the pit. We stand between you and the abyss.”

  “Dramatic,” I said, coughing, “and I’m normally up for that, but—why the hell were there demons in my kitchen?” I finished with a roar.
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br />   “They followed Rindahl to your home.”

  Rindahl.

  “You call him Ryan.”

  My eyes flicked to the man I was crazy about. I saw how wounded he looked, his eyes wet and pleading.

  “Look at me.”

  I had to turn back to Jael, who I realized now was just massive. With him sitting down, we were almost eye to eye. Standing, he would have towered over me. “What’s a verdant demon?” I asked.

  Jael frowned. “I don’t understand. What class of demon?”

  I made a noise in the back of my throat; I had no idea what I was even asking.

  “Verdant demons cluster together in one place. They have an almost hive mentality. They are as vicious in battle as they are well-trained and synchronized.” He looked at me intently. “What else would you like to know?’

  I had just received the Wikipedia answer to my verdant demon inquiry. Christ, the whole thing was absurd. “That’s not what I meant,” I scoffed, hovering between yelling until I felt better and thinking I was dreaming. Everything I knew had been changed in an instant.

  “Julian—”

  “I’m losing my mind,” I said, closing my eyes, concentrating on breathing, counting. I needed things to be normal just as I had an inkling that they never would be again.

  “Listen to—”

  My eyes snapped open. “Who the hell are you? Why are in my house? And what the hell is a sentinel?”

  Jael’s eyes glinted, but there was nothing else. “Rindahl has chosen well.”

  I put out my arm, braced myself on the wall to my right, and focused on taking deep in-and-out breaths.

  “Mr. Nash?”

  “Every city has a sentinel?” I asked him, breath in, breath out.

  “Yes,” he answered softly.

  “And every sentinel has five warders?”

  “Like the fixed points of a pentagram, yes.”