Authors: Christine Warren
Ella turned away, her stomach heaving.
Kees cursed and threw himself forward, and Ella knew things had gotten very, very bad.
She spun back toward the circle to see Kees and the demon clash head-on over the body of Patrick Stanley. Apparently demons healed quickly, at least when they ate human hearts, because the creature now stood on two partially formed legs. Ella didn’t know if the creature normally had lower limbs less than half the length of the upper or if its healing had been incomplete. What she did know was that it was mobile and that its ugly black claws had already carved a deep gash in Kees’s shoulder.
God, would this night never end?
Ella searched her recollection for the final spell she had committed to memory that afternoon—the demon binding. The other two had worked out pretty well so far, so she might as well go for the trifecta.
She reached deep again, frowned, and then reached deeper. She swore and felt herself grow pale. Her well was dry. Expending all that energy had drained her. It explained her faint dizziness and the shakes she had been ignoring because now was not the time to fall to pieces. She couldn’t stand by and let the demon tear Kees apart the way it had done to Stanley, not when he was already tired and weakened. She had to cast that spell and it had to be now.
Which left her only one choice.
“Forgive me, big guy,” she muttered, and lifted her hands.
This time, she didn’t reach down into herself; she reached out to the nearly intangible connection Alan had created between her and Kees. She could feel his exhaustion, but a Guardian was made of magic, and as long as he lived, he had power she could tap. What she had to do might drain him, but it would end the demon, and possibly save his life.
Kees had told her a thousand times that his mission was to destroy demons or die in the attempt. She really hoped she wasn’t about to help with option number two.
She saw Kees jerk when he felt her pull on him and winced when the momentary distraction allowed the demon to land another solid blow, this one to Kees’s back just over his kidneys. If he had kidneys. She’d learned a lot about gargoyle external anatomy in the past week, but it looked like she had some questions to ask about what went on inside. Yet another reason to keep alive the guy with all the answers.
The magic flowed into Ella and took her by surprise. It felt different from what she was used to, different from the magic that lived inside her and different from the kind that could be pulled from the Source. This was … richer. She couldn’t quite describe it, but it was like the magic had a flavor, and this kind tasted thick and spicy. She wished she had time to savor it.
Kees reeled to the side, the demon’s long, multi-hinged arm catching him under a horn and sending him stumbling. He fell to one knee and his chest heaved with exertion.
Ella cried out. Reaching down, she scooped up the dagger she had dropped after escaping the circle and grasped the hilt. With a quick prayer for accuracy, she drew her arm back and threw the knife. She wasn’t throwing from the blade as she’d seen in the movies, and she wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d hit her target and drop it instantly. She just needed to get close.
The dagger whooshed through the air and slapped the demon harmlessly in the chest before sliding to the ground at its feet. It didn’t even seem to notice, but Ella saw, and it was close enough.
Wrenching Kees’s magic to her, Ella hurled it toward the dagger and screamed,
“Tenetur ad hanc rem!”
The explosion of light blinded her.
Ella reflexively raised an arm to cover her eyes but not before she saw Kees collapse. Her stomach dropped and her blood froze. Dear Lord, what had she done?
Then there was an enormous rush of air, like the earth itself had sighed, and the light faded.
The demon was gone.
Ella barely noticed. She flew to Kees’s side and knelt next to his limp form. He was so still, silent and unmoving. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Her hands shook as she reached for his head and tried to lift it into her lap, but it was heavier than she could have imagined. Eventually, she grasped his horns and tugged with all her might and managed to shift it. He moaned when he landed hard against her thigh.
It was the sweetest sound she had ever heard.
“Kees.” Her voice sounded hoarse and choked in her own ears. “Kees, baby, please. Please tell me you’re okay.” His eyelids flickered but didn’t open. Ella shook him and wiped away the tear that dropped onto his cheek. “Kees, please. I need you to be okay.”
The gargoyle moaned again but still didn’t open his eyes. Instead, his lips parted and he growled, “I’ll be fine as soon as you stop trying to kill me.”
Ella half collapsed and started to laugh, her body curling around him in sheer joy and relief.
“Seriously,” Kees groaned. “If you don’t stop shaking it, my head is going to fall off. I don’t know if aspirin works for Guardians—I’ve never taken them before—but I think I’m about to try. Do we have any in the cabin?”
Ella pulled herself together and tried to suppress the accompanying shudder. Leaning down she pressed a tender kiss to his forehead right between his horns. “Sure, baby. We have as many as you need. Just rest here a minute and then we’ll get you inside and get you some. Okay?”
“Okay.” Kees heaved a sigh, and finally opened his eyes.
Ella looked into those dark pools and saw the light flickering beneath the surface. It was a new light, different from the ones she’d seen before, deeper and somehow more intense. Her throat tightened, and she felt herself wondering if he finally understood what she had already realized.
“Little human,” he murmured, his lips curving tenderly. “I should have known you would be the one to save me, not the other way around. From the very first moment you pierced the fog of my sleep, you have done nothing that I expected. At every turn, you continue to surprise me. But not so much as I surprise myself.
She drew her bottom lip between her teeth and tried not to cry again. For a girl who had lost everything, she felt as if every single wish she’d ever had was about to come true.
“Sweet girl, I truly believed that I came into this world whole, with everything I needed to do my duty and fight back the Darkness. And for centuries I completed my missions. I served the Light and protected the world and not once did I experience any feeling more than the fury of battle or the satisfaction of a job well done.
“Until I met you.”
Ella’s heart stuttered. Kees raised a hand to cup her cheek and she turned into it, savoring the warmth of his rough, leathery skin against hers.
“You have shown me that I was a fool, a bigger fool than I called you. You tried to shut away the magic because you believed it has cost you the people you loved, but I tried to shut away emotion because I didn’t believe a Guardian needed to feel in order to do his duty. I thought emotion was a weakness, but how can it be when two bound together are so obviously more than either is alone?”
He smiled, slowly, tenderly, and brushed his thumb across her lips. “Little human, I love you.”
Ella felt new tears rolling down her cheeks and smiled. She felt as if her heart had just cracked—not painfully, but because it could no longer stretch wide enough to contain her joy. It had cracked open, like the stone skin that had held Kees frozen in place for centuries. In both instances, the result was perfect freedom, Kees from sleep and Ella from pain.
“I love you, too,” she whispered, and leaned down to press her lips gently against his. “Forever.”
“Ah, sweet girl,” he purred, his eyes sparking brightly, “do I have some things to tell you about forever.…”
Chapter Eighteen
When Ella finally checked her cell phone the next morning, she had twelve messages, all from Felicity, but it was hours before she could return them. First, she and Kees had a little cleaning up to do.
They took care of the demon first. Ella collected the dagger with carefully gloved hands and laid it in the hole Kees had dug a good half mile behind the cabin, deep in the deserted woods. She used an entire box of salt, both as a bed and a covering for the cursed item, making sure every last inch of it was covered in the stuff. Then they covered it with three feet of heavy, rocky soil.
Straightening up the yard turned out not to be quite so simple.
She felt a little like a mafioso, looking out over her front yard and picturing the faces of the people she’d destroyed in the spots where they had died, but unlike the average character on
The Sopranos,
she at least didn’t have to get rid of the bodies..
Magic obviously had its benefits, even if it felt weird to be happy about the all-consuming nature of the Darkness.
The one thing they did have to deal with was the practicalities of the cars the
nocturnis
had used to get to the cabin. They had been parked on the road a half mile from the cabin. She and Kees ferried them to a remote parking area at Porpoise Bay. When the authorities finally investigate the abandoned vehicles, they would wonder what had happened to the owners, but the location would point toward lost hikers or kayakers, not to a group attacking the Harrow cabin.
Dealing with the practicalities here had made Ella nervous about returning to Vancouver. Ever. By now, she felt certain the police would have begun looking for Detective McQuaid and his partner, assuming Harker had also been with the force. Kees told her not to worry. For one thing, he pointed out, the men had clearly not sought her out on official business, so there was unlikely to be any record of their visit to her apartment, and therefore nothing to link their disappearance to her. For another, there were ways—magical ways—to alter the memories of people if they did start poking around.
Ella clearly had a lot to learn about the potential inherent in her powers. She got the feeling she’d be hitting the books pretty hard in the near future.
When they had moved the last of the cars and returned to the cabin late in the afternoon, Ella finally brought up the one thing that had begun to bother her since the night before.
Forever.
“We can’t be together forever,” she blurted out while Kees built a fire in the hearth.
She’d told him she was too tired to bother with lighting one, but it got cold this time of year, especially at night, so he’d won that argument. When he dropped a giant log on his foot, she realized maybe she should have eased into the discussion.
Rising to his feet, Kees kicked the log away and stalked over to the sofa where she sat. He stopped immediately in front of her and folded his arms across his chest, forcing her to look up and up and up to see his face. The jerk had intimidation techniques down pat.
“What are you talking about?” His snarl tipped her off that she definitely should have eased in.
“You know I’m right,” she said, glaring at him. In for a penny, and all that. “There’s no way we can be together forever. I can’t be forever, period. You might be a Guardian, but I’m just a human. I don’t get to be immortal. I’m going to get older and older and uglier and uglier, and you’re going to stay gorgeous and perfect just the way you are now. And it’s not even like in the vampire novels, where you can bite me and make me like you so I can stay young and live with you forever. Frankly, it just blows.”
Then he laughed, and she wondered if she wanted him around forever anyway.
Kees saw her eyes narrow dangerously and struggled to wipe away his smile. She could see him do it. For a man who’d been created with a stony expression, he had an awful hard time keeping a straight face these days.
Reaching out, Kees scooped her into his arms and took a seat on the sofa, settling her into his lap. Rather than cuddling close as she usually did, Ella held herself stiff as a board and continued to glower at him.
“Little human, sometimes I think you just enjoy having something to worry about,” he teased, pulling her close in spite of her rigid resistance. “You’re right that this is not like the stories humans have written about vampires. I cannot change you into something like me, nor would I want to. You know how I have lived, trapped in endless centuries of sleep, just waiting for the call to battle to stir me awake. Always alone. Never experiencing even the most simple human emotions. I would do anything to prevent you from living that torment.”
Ella frowned. This was the first time Kees had described his life as “torment,” even though she, personally, had always thought it sounded like a pretty lousy deal.
“But if that’s true, what kind of future do we have? There’s a threat growing right now, sure, but if we can do what we have planned, we’ll be able to put a stop to it. We’ll knock the
nocturnis
back into the Stone Age, the Seven will stay confined to their prisons, and the threat will be gone. And then, what? You say, ‘So long,’ and turn back to stone? That sounds like a pretty crappy version of forever.”
Kees pressed a kiss to her forehead and laughed softly. “Such a baby mage you are. You always forget about the magic, silly girl.”
Ella thumped him in the horn. “Don’t patronize. Tell me what you’re talking about. Is there a spell that can make me live as long as you do?”
“No, but there is a spell that can make
me
live as long as
you
do.”
“You mean the thing that Alan did? Will that last forever?”
“Little human, you know that I was summoned to stop the threat of the Seven and to guard against its return, but I am not the first Guardian, and I will not be the last. My brothers and I might be immortal, but as you yourself saw, we are not invulnerable. At times, one of us will fall, and when that happens, the Guild gathers together and another Guardian is summoned to take his place.”
“So?”
“So, while I cannot and will not abandon my duty while a threat looms, I have served humanity for over a thousand years. I believe I have earned my rest.” He met her gaze and hugged her close. “Once this threat is defeated and the Guild is back on its feet, I will request to be released from my duties. I will step down from the Guardians and ask that another be summoned to take my place.”