Guardian Demon (GUARDIAN SERIES)

by Meljean Brook

  They spun into the empty building. No one. Then Michael jumped again, and even before she opened her eyes she knew where he’d gone next—the warehouse in the old naval shipyards where it had all begun. Where Lucifer had lost his wager and cut off Sir Pup’s heads and Taylor had told Lucifer to fuck off and Joe had laughed.

  Oh, God.

  Taylor fell to her knees. Michael had vanished. Then the spinning stopped and she looked through the open warehouse door.

  Inside, a woman kneeling beside Joe’s naked form plunged a knife into his already-bloodied chest.

  “No!” Taylor flung herself forward and slammed into a wall of air as strong as steel. The shielding spell. Screaming, she battered her fists against it but no one inside could hear and no one turned to look.

  Four humans . . . and four beings with white wings and bright, bright threads.

  Demons.

  Michael appeared, Rosalia and Deacon at his side. He vanished again. Deacon flinched away from the sun and Rosalia’s dark Gift snapped open, her grief and horror swirling through her dizzy psychic scent.

  Hysterical sobs tearing at her throat, Taylor concentrated on her own Gift, on Joe’s threads. Almost all bright. She followed one, her focus tight as the thread extended toward the door, through the shield. Then she had it, joy bursting through her as she gripped the glowing strand in her fist.

  The knife plunged again.

  Then Drifter and Charlie were there, and Michael stood at her side, icy rage like a glacial blade against her shields. Sir Pup arrived and crowded in beside him, a chorus of terrifying growls rumbling from the hellhound’s heads.

  Drifter pushed past Taylor, Charlie’s fangs in his arm and the vampire’s mind blaring a demon’s psychic scent as they began to unlock the shield.

  “Hurry! Oh, my God! No, no, nonono!” Terror rushed her words into a single cry as Joe’s threads pulled tight—

  Then were sucked away.

  Taylor screamed, though there was still joy in her hand, and she was holding on to his thread, to his soul, and would never let go.

  She could bring him back. Like she had the demon. Bring him back and—

  The shield went down and she was running, faster than she’d ever run, in a line straight to Joe, aware of the bright demons streaking toward her and the glint of their steel, then the dragon’s roar behind her and the explosion of blood and flesh when Michael and Sir Pup intercepted them.

  Taylor dropped to her knees in a pool of Joe’s blood, reaching for his wrist. On the other side of his body, Patricia Johnson shrieked and Deacon dragged the woman away. Other humans cried out in fear and scrambled toward the door, then scrambled back as Sir Pup blocked the entrance. Drifter tossed pairs of handcuffs to Deacon and the vampire had them all bound within seconds.

  Their horror was sharp and the Guardians’ grief strong, but Taylor only felt joy and warmth and hope as she knotted the thread around Joe’s wrist.

  As soon as she let go, the glowing strand slipped through flesh and bones like air.

  Panic jolted through her, and she leapt after the thread as it was sucked away, feet slipping on blood but her fingers catching the very end of the strand. Joy burst through her again, but she was crying, crying as she turned to Michael, who was bending over Joe’s still form. His healing Gift stroked warm hands over her psychic shields.

  “Heal him.” On her knees, she lifted Joe’s head into her lap. Tears burned down her cheeks. “Please bring him back.”

  He lifted a stricken gaze to hers. “I can’t.”

  Because humans had stabbed him, and his Gift couldn’t heal those injuries. “Then transform him into a Guardian. Please.”

  Closing his eyes, he shook his head. “I would if I could. But I can’t.”

  Only if Joe had sacrificed himself. But he hadn’t. He’d simply been sacrificed.

  Desperately, she looked for Charlie, but the vampire was already there, ripping her wrist open with her teeth and pouring her blood over the eight puncture wounds on Joe’s chest.

  Charlie’s hoarse voice shook with tears. “It’s not healing.”

  “Into his mouth. He wanted to be a vampire.”

  Nodding, Charlie opened her wrist again, then Michael was beside her and the blood he used to fill Joe’s mouth was richer, stronger. Nosferatu blood.

  “Come on, Joe. Please.” Taylor stroked his throat, but he couldn’t swallow, so she bent over and pressed her lips to his and exhaled, trying to force the blood down into him, and when his chest suddenly expanded, hope rose and was destroyed in the same instant that bubbles formed at the edges of one of the wounds. He hadn’t taken a breath. That was her air filling his lungs.

  Her tears streaming, she shook her head. Rubbed his throat again. “You can’t do this, Joe. Come on. I came back when you asked me to. Now I’m begging you. Please. Please, God. Please.”

  Nothing.

  Utter despair pushed another sob from her. She tried to tie the thread and caught the strand before it slipped away again.

  Because he had no body to go back to. His was too damaged to hold a life.

  Her fist clenched around the thread, she rocked forward and pulled Joe closer against her chest, sobbing. “Help me, Michael. Please. Help me.”

  Warm and strong, his arms came around her. Offering the only help he could.

  Comfort.

  Then holding her back when despair became rage and she screamed, screamed because her friend was gone and she could see the fuckers who’d done it. His arms tightened when she tried to rise.

  She fought him, screaming again. “I’m sending them all to Hell.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t care if I Fall!”

  “I know.” Grief roughened his voice. “But they’re humans. They committed a crime against a human. It’s for humans to decide what punishment they will have. If you judge them now, Andromeda, you would never forgive yourself.”

  She didn’t care about that, either. Her hate like a cold fire around her heart, she watched the red threads wind through the souls of the four handcuffed murderers. They were regarding her with horror, as if she was somehow worse than what they were.

  So much red. “You’re all going to Hell,” she told them. “Each one of you. And you’ll burn and burn.”

  “Not long enough.” The cage of Michael’s arms eased open, offering comfort again instead of holding her back. “Rosalia, take Charlie and Deacon to headquarters. Ethan, the demons’ bodies. Not a single drop of any other blood can remain. I’ve already vanished the dragon blood.”

  Rosalia nodded, and as the darkness gathered around her, Michael added quietly, “Tell them the portal to Chaos has been created on this side.”

  And they’d used Taylor’s friend to do it. Heart a solid ache, she looked down at Joe’s wrinkled face. More tears dripped onto his cheeks, his soul still clutched in her hand.

  Beside her, Michael’s voice dropped into darkness, the echo from the abyss. A phone appeared in his palm. “This is your choice, Andromeda. Call the police and bring them here, so that justice might be done. But if you prefer their deaths, I will kill them for you.”

  Taylor did want their deaths. But only a part of her did.

  Because that wasn’t who she was. It wasn’t who Joe had been. And she wouldn’t ask Michael to be something that he wasn’t, either.

  She took the phone.

  * * *

  She held on to Joe’s thread while they gave their statements. It wasn’t even much of a lie. Agent Ethan McCabe had been working with Joe on a case regarding unsolved murders. Recently, they’d become aware that several people connected to the case had vanished, and they suspected that it was connected to the murder of Mark Brandt in Seattle. Taylor had discovered that Joe was missing when she’d gone to visit him, and she and her friend Michael Smith had tracked him down, using Michael’s dog to follow the scent.

  And Joe’s murderers were babbling about angels and vampires as they were taken away, which made their
statement much easier to believe.

  The detectives who interviewed Taylor were from a different station, not the one where she and Joe had worked, but he’d still been one of theirs. She had been, too. When her former captain arrived on the scene, she expected another “I knew you’d pull him down with you” speech, but he only spoke of grief and sympathy and anger.

  Taylor couldn’t manage any of those anymore. Her hand still clenched in a fist, she stared into nothing as they took her blood-soaked clothes for evidence. She walked out wearing a sweatsuit with the same SFPD logo that she’d worn most of her life.

  Michael waited for her in the clothes they’d given him, too. And though he’d broken her heart, she took the hand he offered and let him pull her in close, his arms around her.

  She struggled not to start crying again. “I have to go tell my mom.”

  And she couldn’t show up bawling. She needed to be the strong one now. To give her mom someone to hold on to.

  But even though Taylor’s tears didn’t fall, her mom knew anyway. She took one look at Taylor and dropped into a chair, her eyes going blank, and Taylor remembered that her mother had done the same when they’d come to tell her about her dad. Her mother hadn’t cried then. She didn’t now.

  “I tried to hold on to him,” Taylor told her and opened her Gift. Joy cascaded through her heart, but she was struggling not to cry again, sinking to her knees in front of her mom’s chair. “I caught his soul but I couldn’t put it back in him. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t—”

  She couldn’t do this. Harsh sobbing breaths ripped up from her gut, and she felt her mom’s hand in her hair, but Taylor wasn’t going to cry.

  Swallowing hard, she tried again. “I still have it. I still feel it. I wish you could, too. There’s so much joy there.”

  Holding her gaze, her mother smoothed her hand down Taylor’s cheek. “Are you keeping him here?”

  “I don’t know.” Her tears spilled again. “But I can’t let him go.”

  “Oh, baby.”

  Gently, her mom pushed her fingers open. The joy vanished, and only pain was left.

  She dropped her head to her mother’s lap and cried.

  * * *

  Taylor didn’t have any more tears. She was empty. Numb as Michael and other Guardians were in and out of the apartment over the next few hours. More cops came to visit—no questions, just those people she and Joe had worked with, and who wanted to pay their respects. Mary Gallagher came to sit with Jason when exhaustion and grief and a sedative carried her mom to sleep. And when Michael returned again, wearing his suit, Taylor knew that it was time to go.

  She stepped into his arms and they spun into a darkened office. She didn’t need to ask where they were. The sounds within the building were as familiar as her own voice. A police station.

  “They are questioning the four from the warehouse,” Michael told her. “Captain Jorgenson has invited you to watch. Lilith, too.”

  A professional courtesy. A personal courtesy, too. She hadn’t expected it from Jorgenson. “Even though we’ve been disavowed?”

  “That was never mentioned.”

  Probably because Jorgenson and other cops had dealt with Lilith often enough that it wouldn’t occur to them to think SI wasn’t a legit agency now. “Good.”

  But when she started for the door, Michael didn’t come with her. She turned and saw that he’d formed his armor instead, his black wings arching up to the ceiling.

  The sadness she’d seen in his expression so many times in the past few days was deeper now, deeper than the shadows in his obsidian eyes.

  A fist lodged in her throat, punching away the numbness. “What is this?”

  “The sentinels created the portal.” Though quiet, the harmony of his voice was rough. “If Lucifer breaks through the frozen field in Hell, we won’t be able to prevent him from coming through to Earth. I need to stop him.”

  “By joining Anaria’s army?”

  “Yes.”

  Fear gripped her chest. “But you said Lucifer was too powerful to defeat now.”

  His face bleak, Michael nodded. “I have to try.”

  Because he was Michael. The big damn hero.

  And she’d never have fallen in love with him if he’d ever given any other response. “Will you be coming back?”

  “If he breaks through to Chaos, I’ll return to fight him when he comes through the portal. But if we stop him in Hell, I won’t be returning.”

  She stared at him. So this was it. He’d said he was leaving. And she’d told him to go. Now she couldn’t believe that this was the end.

  Her breath shuddered. “I would say that I can’t bear to lose you now, too. But I never really had you.”

  A tortured sound ripped from his chest. Michael crossed the room, caught her face in his hands. “I am yours, Andromeda. I will always be yours.”

  His mouth lowered to hers, his kiss sweet and the hum in his throat singing a broken good-bye. And although she didn’t have any more inside her, though her eyes were dry, tears dripped over her cheeks.

  Then he lifted his head and was gone.

  CHAPTER 20

  It just didn’t make sense.

  Taylor stood in the darkened observation room, watching through the one-way mirror as detectives questioned Dennis Parkins. Captain Jorgenson stood on her left, and the assistant district attorney next to him. A few other cops behind her. On her right, Lilith looked on with narrowed eyes and flattened lips as Parkins described how the angel had brought Joe’s coffee cup to him to drug before returning it to the bathroom. All of them killers, but Parkins had been the one to steal Joe’s chance to fight back.

  Only Patricia Johnson had lawyered up. And Parkins’s story was the same as Benjamin Nguyen’s and Jeffrey Green’s had been. A few of the details were different, but it was all basically the same.

  Visited first by Mark Brandt, who’d told them that the murderer of their loved ones would never be punished because of a conspiracy to cover up vampirism. And the investigator from Special Investigations coming around to ask them about the murders hadn’t just been covering them up—Joseph Preston had killed their loved ones in order to earn the right to become a vampire himself, and the only reason he kept returning wasn’t to solve the case, but to bask in their pain.

  Then the angels had shown up after Brandt’s death, asking them if they wanted to see justice done.

  No matter the pain and grief and anger, not everyone would want to take revenge through murder. Taylor thought that most people wouldn’t. But the demons just needed one person to carry out Joe’s sacrifice, so they’d found the most susceptible and worked on them—killing their family members, feeding them lies. Taylor couldn’t imagine how many thousands of people they must have studied and considered before choosing those few who would actually do it. But obviously the demons had chosen well.

  They’d only needed one, but they’d gotten four.

  And Taylor didn’t need Lilith to tell her what lay behind it all: Lucifer. Because opening the portal wasn’t enough. Not when there were so many souls to damn and innocent people to kill and revenge to take on Joe for laughing.

  Revenge on Taylor, too, when killing Joe ripped out her heart.

  She hadn’t known that she’d had so many hearts to break. But apparently a multitude beat in her chest. Maybe she should have done a better job to protect them.

  But not if protecting her heart meant that she would have missed a single second with Joe. Not even if losing him hurt a million times as much. She wouldn’t trade any part of her friendship to spare herself the pain now.

  She wouldn’t have traded Michael, either.

  And his leaving just didn’t make sense.

  Leaving to fight Lucifer, to stop the portal from opening—that made sense. But he’d been planning to leave before that. And what was his reason? He wanted to live his own life.

  That made zero fucking sense. Being a Guardian was his life. And that shit about learnin
g all he could? He’d already been doing that.

  And what he’d done to her was cruel. That wasn’t Michael. He could be cruel. She’d seen up-close evidence of that. But he didn’t choose to be cruel.

  She believed he hadn’t intended to hurt her—and she believed that Michael hadn’t thought she would fall in love with him. After all, only a few days earlier she’d been ready to shoot him in the head. She’d told him that loving him was unthinkable and that she didn’t want him to love her, either.

  But Michael wasn’t an idiot. He’d known people for eight thousand years. He’d watched her, studied her. He knew her.

  So why hadn’t he seen how she felt? Because that didn’t make sense, either.

  Or maybe she was just desperately trying to think of any reason to believe he wasn’t a cruel bastard. To believe that she hadn’t been completely deluded, like Charlie’s sister.

  But it wouldn’t stop nagging at her. Through the numbness of watching Parkins describe why and how he’d murdered her friend, her brain wouldn’t stop.

  Because Michael had never promised anything like a future. That would have been really cruel. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he’d have made a thousand promises. But he’d only said that he was hers.

  And he’d said things like I don’t have enough time. There isn’t enough time.

  Her heart clenched. Michael knew that a battle with Lucifer was coming up. He had to know he might die in the process. Just like any warrior.

  Knowing that could make anyone do stupid things. Like Joe, terrified of a tumor and calling her a quitter. Except where Joe had lashed out, Michael had sworn never to hurt her. So maybe his stupid thing had been believing that he wouldn’t hurt her.

  But that still didn’t make sense. Because Michael had said he was leaving regardless of the outcome with Lucifer. And a battle wasn’t something he had to protect her from. Every Guardian knew that death was a possibility on the job. Against Lucifer, the chances might be higher, but it was a risk they all took, and that wasn’t something he’d have to conceal from her with a lie about leaving and living his own life. Because that had been a lie. She was sure of it.