Demon Marked
( The Guardians - 7 )
Meljean Brook
In this stunning and sexy addition to the world of the Guardians, a man seeks revenge against the half-demon he once loved...
Nicholas St. Croix is familiar with the evil of demons. After his father's death, he was raised by the demon who had taken over his mother's body. Six years ago, his "mother" was responsible for the disappearance of the woman he loved, and Nicholas swore he'd find her--even if he had to go to Hell and back. Except she finds him first--and with one tormented kiss, he knows that she, too, is a demon. Now he is determined to take his revenge.
Ash is a half-demon with no memory of her past or how she got to Hell. All she knows is that Nicholas St. Croix holds the key to her identity. And though he's clearly drawn to her, Nicholas makes no secret of his distrust of her. Yet one kiss at a time, he breaks down her defenses as they battle an array of demons and Guardians. But is Ash's greatest enemy the man at her side?
Meljean Brook
DEMON MARKED
The Guardians - 7
CHAPTER 1
Ash hadn’t meant to frighten the girl. She hadn’t even noticed the little blonde until after the subway train pulled away. The disembarking crowd quickly dispersed, leaving the underground platform empty but for Ash and a few other waiting passengers. In a blue princess’s costume and a plastic tiara, the girl stood next to her mother, clutching a bag of party favors to her small chest. Though her face was turned away and Ash couldn’t see the girl’s smile, she could taste the happiness emanating from her, unsurprisingly sweet.
Had Ash ever felt that much joy as a girl? She couldn’t remember. Emotions must have touched her deeply at some point in her life, because she recognized how little they touched her now—as if her ruined memory hid enough data to compare an After to a Before that she couldn’t recall. And though she knew those emotions were missing, Ash didn’t feel their loss like a hacked-off limb. Even her sense of emptiness remained on the surface, no different from noticing a bruise on her knee and idly wondering when she’d gotten it.
With the same idle interest, Ash observed the girl, who lifted the side of her hem and twirled around her mother as if circling a ballroom. The tiara’s paste jewels flashed beneath the fluorescent lights, and a name leapt into Ash’s mind— Cinderella—but there was something else, an impression just beyond it, like lightning seen from the corner of her eye, like a word at the tip of her tongue.
Her name? No longer idly curious, Ash stared at the girl, mentally replaying that twirl and the flash of light, willing the impression to strengthen into a solid connection, so that she could trace the memory to its source. Was Ash’s full name at the end of it?
Cinderella wasn’t right. Reminded by the girl’s dance, Ash could suddenly recall images from the animated movie, the gliding waltz around the ballroom with the prince, but the connection she sought wasn’t there. Ash was looking for something a step aside from Cinderella. The girl in the cinders and ashes . . . ?
That wasn’t right, either. Not quite.
Why couldn’t she remember? Frustration skimmed over the surface of her mind like a blade over ice, leaving little evidence of its passing. What had happened to separate Before from an After that contained memories, but was still so empty?
Dimly, she became aware that the girl had dropped her bag of party favors to the train platform. Treats and noisemakers forgotten, she tugged insistently on her mother’s hand, her widened eyes never leaving Ash’s. Happiness had changed to sour fear, far stronger than the unease children usually projected when they glimpsed the vermillion symbols tattooed over the left side of Ash’s face. The girl’s distress intruded on Ash’s focus, and the impression of the name she’d been seeking faded.
It disappeared altogether when the mother’s gaze followed her daughter’s. Unlike the girl’s sour fear, the mother’s tasted of bitter cold, like icy sweat against Ash’s tongue.
Dread and terror.
From the tunnel came the clatter of an approaching train. The woman gathered up the girl and set off for the far end of the platform at a stiff-legged trot. The look she threw over her shoulder included bared teeth—the mother protecting her young.
Fear wasn’t just an emotion. Sometimes, it was a survival instinct.
But why consider Ash a threat? Not just the tattoos, obviously. In this part of London, heavy ink sometimes provoked fascination or disgust, but was common enough that it didn’t incite terror.
Ash glanced down, where more symbols marked her hands. Around the tattoos, the skin was tan, not the crimson it sometimes became. Her jeans and leather jacket hadn’t disappeared—and when her clothes vanished, she knew very well that titters and gasps followed. Not fear.
Brakes screeched as the train stopped. Ash’s image reflected faintly in the car windows. Beneath the sweep of blond hair across her forehead, Ash’s eyes shone as brilliantly red as two small stoplights.
Ah. So that was the cause of their fear. Ash wasn’t surprised; when she’d lived at Nightingale House, the same glow had come a few times, and she’d only noticed when the lights in her room were out—and because she’d once terrified a ward nurse making the night rounds.
The hysterical nurse had returned less than a minute later with an orderly in tow, but Ash’s eyes had looked like any other person’s eyes by then.
Glowing eyes, red skin—the changes always faded within moments of Ash noticing them. In the train window’s reflection, her irises had already returned to a more human blue, her pupils were black, the whites white. She glanced toward the girl again, but the mother had hustled past the disembarking passengers and taken a seat. The woman held her daughter, staring at Ash through the window—likely praying that she wouldn’t board the train with them. The girl huddled on her lap, her blue dress twisted around her legs, and Ash’s earlier impression suddenly solidified into a word: Aschenputtel.
Ash’s disappointment was a soft weight, barely felt. Though the first syllable of Ash’s name sounded similar, Aschenputtel was Cinderella’s name, not hers. So she would have to keep searching.
The train began to move. Not so frightened now, the little blonde peeked beneath her mother’s arm and met Ash’s gaze. Brave girl. Ash smiled faintly and lifted her hand in acknowledgment.
Hello, little princess. You’ve escaped a monster who can’t remember her name, or even what sort of monster she is. But don’t worry that I’ll crawl under your bed . . . unless, of course, you have answers there.
The train clattered down the tunnel, taking the girl with it. To avoid further notice, Ash drew up the hood of the sweatshirt layered beneath her jacket, then settled in to wait for another ten minutes. That had been her train, but she didn’t feel impatience any more than she did frustration or disappointment.
Curiosity wasn’t an emotion, however, but a state of being—and so Ash did wonder why she hadn’t boarded despite their fear. After all, frightening a little girl was the least of her sins. She’d also jumped the high gates at the subway entrance instead of paying her fare. Later that evening, she planned on breaking into a dead woman’s home.
Disregarding the girl’s terror hadn’t felt right, however—and Ash spent the next ten minutes trying to decide whether “feeling right” was an emotion, or something else.
A month ago, shortly before had Ash escaped from Nightingale House, she’d slipped into Dr. Cawthorne’s office after midnight and read through every file and notebook that referred to her. Cawthorne knew nothing of Before, not even her name. She’d been committed as a Jane Doe, and in the computers and on the file labels she was called “Mary Bloggs,” a placeholder designation often followed by the date of her admission. That day, during one of Ash’s t
herapy sessions, he’d written into his notebook: Schizoid personality disorder?
He’d underlined the question mark twice.
After almost three years in the care of his private mental hospital, the psychiatrist still hadn’t known how to classify her. Not that Ash had helped him along. Two years had passed before she’d spoken aloud, and nine more months had gone by before she’d cared enough to wonder who she was and what had happened to her.
Though he’d speculated, Dr. Cawthorne hadn’t figured that out, either.
In his earliest notes, he’d attributed her lack of verbal response to brain damage caused by her persistent febrile temperature—a fever hot enough that Ash should have been hospitalized. Cawthorne’s records didn’t indicate why she hadn’t been given emergency care; he only indicated that her fever didn’t respond to medications or external remedies. Finally, when it became apparent that neither weakness nor delirium accompanied the fever, Dr. Cawthorne had stopped trying to lower it.
Ash had clear memories from those days. She remembered nothing from before Nightingale House, and everything after. She could recall how she hadn’t spoken, but had automatically obeyed every instruction given to her: to get up in the morning, to shower, to dress, to eat breakfast, to sit and watch television, to eat dinner, and then to lie in bed until she was told to get up again. At the end of the first year, Cawthorne had noted in his spidery scrawl: Mary-052007 will not respond to any name, but displays clear comprehension of verbal and written instructions when they are spoken directly to or placed in front of her. She performs both menial tasks and more complex operations, such as solving mathematical equations, tending the garden, or typing and sending an e-mail (dictated).
They’d instructed; she’d performed. When they asked her to accomplish tasks that were impossible to carry out, such as urinating into a cup, they never tried to force her. The nurses simply noted “Mary’s” lack of response in her chart, and Dr. Cawthorne would write the name of another disorder in his notes, followed by another question mark.
The second year had passed in the same way. A few weeks into the third year, the doctor had been thumbing through the calendar on his desk and making his usual, halfhearted attempts to draw out a response—
How are you today? Pause. The rain has let up. You’ll be able to take your afternoon walk through the garden, though it will be too wet for planting. What sort of flowers should we add this year? Pause. Peonies would be lovely, wouldn’t they?
—when he’d cut his thumb on the edge of the calendar paper. Another pause had followed the peonies as he’d stuck his thumb into his mouth, and Ash had remembered that she’d once drunk her own blood, too. She’d remembered the blade carving symbols into her face, her torso and arms. She’d remembered the knife at her chest, and the dark figure pronouncing her name—but she’d only heard the first syllable before his terrible voice had torn everything apart.
Sitting in Dr. Cawthorne’s office, that memory had quickly faded—or she’d stifled it, just as she stifled the tremors that shook her body when she thought of that dark figure. Just enough of the memory remained, however, to remind her that she had to tell Cawthorne something.
“My name isn’t Mary,” she’d said.
Dr. Cawthorne’s hand dropped away from his mouth. He’d stared at her, his jaw agape. Whenever someone on the television wore that expression, a faceless crowd laughed on the soundtrack. No one in Cawthorne’s office laughed in the background. The only reaction that Ash could detect was the sudden shift of Cawthorne’s emotions: from frustration and resignation to surprise and excitement.
But though she could sense his exhilaration, he didn’t show it. Evenly, he’d asked, “What is your name, then?”
“Ash . . . something. I don’t know the rest.”
“Ashley?”
“No.” She was certain.
He’d nodded in that same slow, calm way, but to her ears, his heart pounded almost as loud as his voice. “Until we know, may we call you ‘Ash’?”
“Yes.”
Smiling, he leaned back in his chair and studied her. “And you’re an American? Canadian?”
“I don’t know.”
“But your accent is . . .” He’d shaken his head. “No matter. You’re here now, and it’s wonderful to hear your voice after all this time. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
“No.” She’d already told him that her name wasn’t Mary. That was all she’d had to say.
His excitement dimmed, followed by his relief when he’d continued talking and she’d continued answering him. But by the time he’d ended the session—an hour later than usual—unease threaded through his curiosity. He’d already been jotting notes when she rose from her chair to leave.
She’d stopped long enough to ask, “What does ‘complete lack of affect’ mean?”
His pencil lead snapped. He’d looked up from his notebook, his face carefully blank and his emotions an indistinguishable riot. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you’ve written it about me in your notes.”
It was one of the few phrases he’d scribbled that hadn’t been followed by a question mark. Another had been “source amnesia,” but he’d explained that while they’d been talking: It meant her procedural memory and factual knowledge remained, though she’d no recollection of how or when she’d learned them.
“Ah.” His gray eyebrows had lifted into an open expression. A friendly smile shaped his mouth. “A lack of affect simply means that someone doesn’t display a marked emotional reaction . . . or empathy for others.”
His conflicting feelings and facial expressions suggested that he assumed Ash would be disturbed by that explanation, and that he was trying to soften its delivery.
She wasn’t disturbed. She’d already known that she didn’t feel anything like the emotions she regularly sensed in other people. Nodding, she’d turned to go.
“Ash . . .” When she’d glanced back at Dr. Cawthorne, he wore a puzzled frown. “How did you know what I’d written? My notepad was angled away from you.”
“Yes. But it reflected in the glass.”
She’d pointed to the framed diplomas hanging on the wall behind him. He’d looked around; when he’d turned back to Ash, his smile had been bright. He’d said something about her cleverness, but she’d tasted his sour fear.
The reaction of the nurses and caregivers had echoed his: excitement followed by unease, and punctuated with spurts of fear. They began calling her Ash, but when they spoke together in other rooms and thought she couldn’t hear them, they referred to her as “the American,” as if trying to put distance between themselves and her. Ash paid closer attention to the actors on television after that, particularly the never-ending soap operas. Mimicking those accents upset the nurses more, however. Only after she’d overheard two of them discussing how unsettling they found her tendency to watch everyone without evincing any emotion, Ash had finally understood that her American origin had never been the issue. It was her lack of affect that disturbed them.
“Even psychopaths learn to fake it,” one of them had said.
But Ash didn’t care enough to fake her emotions, and by the time she’d decided to leave Nightingale House, the nurses didn’t even refer to her as “the American” anymore. She’d become “that one.”
That one, who’d caused an uproar of hilarity and shock when her clothes had vanished during a group therapy session—followed by greater shock and fear when, after Ash had noticed her nudity, jeans and a T-shirt that the nurses hadn’t seen before simply appeared on her body. That one, whose blond hair—which the nurses had kept short for easy care—had grown to the middle of her back during a walk through the garden one August afternoon. That one, who’d pulled a prank with glowing eyes, and terrified one of the nurses so badly that she’d quit her position the next day. That one, whom the nurses had found crouching atop the roof of Nightingale House one morning, and who’d given no believable explanation of how she’d cli
mbed the turrets. That one, who’d dropped from the roof to the ground as easily as another person stepped out of her bed, despite their pleas for her to stop.
They’d shrieked when she’d jumped—but Ash hadn’t detected any relief from them when she’d landed on her feet, uninjured. There’d only been fear, followed by hot anger.
Another nurse had quit after that, screaming to her supervisor that she’d expected Nightingale House to treat only drugaddicted celebrities and depressed aristos, and that she’d left the government-run hospitals for a posh situation to avoid the psychos. Ash had decided to leave, too, albeit for a different reason. The answer to the one question that interested her—Who am I?—hadn’t been at Nightingale House. No answers were there—except for one, and she’d asked Dr. Cawthorne for that information during her final therapy session.
“A posh hospital must be expensive,” she’d said. “So who is paying for my treatment?”
He’d paled. In the months since she’d begun speaking, the wrinkles around Cawthorne’s eyes and mouth had become more pronounced. His skin had loosened as if he’d dropped weight. But although she’d frightened him at times, he’d never lost color in his face or broken out with a sheen of sweat, as he had then.
His gaze had skidded away from hers. “The money comes from a numbered account. The donor wishes to remain anonymous.”
“But you know who it is.”
His hands trembled. “Yes.”
“And she knows who I am.”
“Probably,” he’d answered, before looking at Ash with surprise. “How did you know it was a she?”
Because a woman had brought her to Nightingale House. Ash avoided the memory of her almost as fiercely as the memory of the dark figure, but she could recall the woman’s face, surrounded by dark hair—and the eyes containing a madness that went deeper than anyone else’s at that hospital. Yet despite her obvious insanity, the woman hadn’t remained here; she’d left Ash behind instead.
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