Guardian Demon (GUARDIAN SERIES) Read online

  Taylor narrowed her eyes at the vampire. “What are you smiling at?”

  “‘You’re not covered in armored scales now, motherfucker.’” Colin’s fancy English accent made her words sound cleverer than they’d been. “I pray that the security cameras captured that. I shall replay it for my enjoyment over the next few centuries.”

  “Pervert,” Savi said.

  “Video blocked, of course.” He gave a mock shudder when his gaze ran over Taylor’s hair. “I see that whatever happened to you has also stolen your ability to see your reflection.”

  Taylor flipped him the bird. Most vampires could see themselves in a mirror, but because of the same curse that linked him to the Chaos realm, Colin couldn’t. His dark blond hair hadn’t seen a comb in decades, yet he still managed to look perfectly, artfully tousled. Taylor’s red curls were just a tangled mess—and she couldn’t care less.

  Savi stepped back, looked her over. “So. How was Hell?”

  “It sucked. Did anything happen while I was out?”

  Colin and Savi exchanged a glance. “Well,” Savi said. “The world didn’t end.”

  “So the Mayans were wrong, then.”

  “Fox Mulder was, too. Either that, or their calculations were a few months off.” Savi stepped back, gestured to the house. “Come on. We’ll fill you in.”

  * * *

  With soaring ceilings, walls painted a golden yellow, and spindly-legged chairs upholstered in flowered silks, the second-floor parlor of Colin and Savi’s mansion reminded Taylor of British historical dramas on public television. If not for Savi herself, Taylor would never have felt comfortable enough to stay ten minutes, let alone visit as often as she did.

  Or at least, as often as she had before Khavi shoved a spear through her chest.

  Savi hadn’t changed much in that time. As a vampire, she would never really change physically. Her dark skin might lighten a tiny bit as the years passed without a touch from the sun, her hair might grow, but she’d forever be twenty-six years old. Neither her curiosity nor her wide-eyed enthusiasm and good humor had changed, though. Taylor prayed Savi never lost those, never became hardened or cynical, because if she did, there obviously wasn’t any chance for the rest of them to make it to the end of life happily.

  As it was, Taylor considered it a minor miracle that she and the other woman had become close. A genius with computers and more interested in shooting zombies in video games than handling a real gun, Savi would have fit well into the circle of friends that Jason had before his accident, but she was unlike any of Taylor’s. She was the sort of person that Taylor had absolutely nothing in common with.

  Except for death . . . and the Guardians.

  Six years before, they’d both still been human. Taylor had been in the other woman’s apartment, investigating the ritual murder of one of Savi’s friends, when a winged woman had teleported in from nowhere and crashed into Savi’s kitchen table. Until that moment, they’d both thought that the stories of nosferatu and the demonic symbols attached to the case had been a sick joke.

  Seeing the Guardian had convinced them. Over the following months, they’d shared all of the information they discovered about demons, vampires, and Guardians—most of that information flowing from Savi to Taylor. But Savi had actually wanted to become a vampire. Learning about the Guardians had opened a new world for her, while Taylor’s world seemed to fall apart. She’d begun clashing with her superiors, with the director at Special Investigations who’d kept horning in on her cases, with Michael when he showed up at her scenes . . . and all of the friends she’d told about vampires and Guardians slowly backed away, no doubt thinking that she’d gone crazy.

  Maybe she had. A little.

  Then Savi had been transformed, and Taylor hadn’t been able to deal. Savi had become too much a part of everything that had been screwing up her head, so she’d tried to cut ties between them. No more lunches, no more e-mails. But when Savi had shown up at the police station where Taylor had worked, hoping to heal Jason with a blood transfusion, Taylor’s reluctant affection for the geeky young vampire had become solid loyalty. It hadn’t been long before she’d considered Savi one of her closest friends—and since she’d become a Guardian, that friendship had probably saved her from going off the deep end a couple of times.

  So now she had a rich, brilliant buddy who could hack into almost any computer system. The only drawback: that buddy came with Colin Ames-Beaumont. Taylor liked to think that hooking Savi up with the vainest vampire in existence was just Nature’s way of keeping everything in balance.

  In Savi’s defense, though—if Colin never opened his mouth, Taylor might have fallen in love with him, too. He was undeniably beautiful.

  And he made certain that everyone knew it. A series of self-portraits—with his face perfectly rendered and painted from memory alone—hung over the staircase leading to the second floor. Fortunately, he wasn’t featured on any of the paintings in the parlor, so she could pace the room without his life-sized image smirking down at her. Landscapes depicting his family’s estate in England decorated the walls instead. His relatives were captured on other canvases, their clothing and hairstyles showing the fashions from the early 1800s to the current decade.

  Two hundred years old. Taylor could barely wrap her head around it, yet she knew that Irena, who’d led the Guardians while Michael was in Hell, had been born more than sixteen hundred years before—and Lilith, the director of Special Investigations, was a few centuries older than that.

  Then there were Michael and Khavi, who were maybe eight or nine thousand years old. Taylor wasn’t sure of the exact date. Though Michael had shared some early memories with her, they hadn’t come with a calendar. She’d seen houses and temples of clay brick, and white plaster courtyards swept clean. She’d felt the hot sun on the back of his neck, the hard soil beneath his bare feet. The primitive hoe in his hands, the wood worn smooth from use. The endless toil of breaking up the clods, the dry fields that gave so little until the rains came—and then the odor of the storms, the heavy, wet earth, breathing the fragrance deep into his lungs.

  If she closed her eyes, Taylor could smell it now. She looked to Savi instead, raising her brows. “So?”

  With a grin, Savi held up her left hand. She’d already worn a platinum band, but now another lay nestled against it. So they’d made it official, then.

  “Congratulations.” Taylor had to grin along with her friend and was sincere when she said, “I’m sorry I missed the ceremony.”

  Savi caught her tongue between her teeth, her expression turning mischievous. “I can give you the video.”

  “Good God, no.” Colin raised a pained glance to the heavens. “She marries the Invisible Man.”

  Because he didn’t show up in mirrors or on film. “I’d watch that,” Taylor said. “So do I owe you guys a wedding present?”

  “Oh, please!” Colin exclaimed, hand over his heart. “I’ve always longed for a ten-dollar gift certificate from Target.”

  Damn it. That was exactly what she’d have given him, too, simply to see his expression when he opened it. “Did it take you the full two and a half years to come up with that one?”

  He flashed a stunning grin. “You’d best fan yourself now. Witnessing the exercise of my extraordinary wit can be quite overwhelming.”

  Okay. Sometimes she did like him.

  Especially now, when she sat on the bench in front of the grand piano, her back to the keys. In this position, she faced the window seat overlooking the park. The pillows were dented from recent use, and on the floor lay an open violin case. He and Savi had been sitting there when she’d arrived at the gate, Taylor realized. He’d probably been playing for her.

  That was sweet. Romantic. They had a good thing going—except for the part where they sucked each other’s blood. No matter how sexy a vampire’s feeding supposedly felt, that was just gross.

  “Anyway.” Savi sank into the window seat, pulling her legs up and curling t
hem beneath her. “That’s pretty much all that has happened. Here on Earth, anyway.”

  On his heels beside the violin case, Colin nodded and loosened the bow’s screw. “With most of Belial’s demons dead and the nephilim slaughtered, we’ve little to report. A few nosferatu have ventured out of their caves, but the Guardians quickly dispatched them.”

  “And Lucifer’s demons seem to be lying low for now,” Savi finished.

  “Then it was quiet while I was out.” And would hopefully stay that way.

  “Mostly. There have been the usual squabbles in some of the vampire communities, a few who have broken the Rules and had to be dealt with.”

  Nothing that could end the world. “And away from Earth?”

  “All of Hell is at war,” Colin said.

  “So everything’s the same.”

  Lucifer had ruled Hell since he’d led his angel cohorts in a rebellion aeons ago, but in his endless grasp for power, he’d created his greatest enemy—Belial, one of the demons who consumed dragon flesh in order to produce offspring with a human.

  That demon was also Michael’s father.

  According to Michael, consuming the dragon’s flesh had transformed Belial in a deeper way: He’d become good. More like a man than a demon. Then the effect of the transformation had worn off, and although Belial’s physical form returned to his original angelic appearance—blindingly, painfully beautiful, with six wings and the same harmonic voice—that appearance was deceiving. He’d started a rebellion against Lucifer in Hell, claiming that he would lead the other demons back to Heaven and return them to Grace. But that was just the propaganda. Belial’s only intention was to take Lucifer’s throne—which would leave the Guardians with one bad option over another.

  Belial wouldn’t be bound by the terms of the wager that had forced Lucifer to close the Gates to Hell. He probably wouldn’t bring dragons from Chaos with him, but Taylor thought Belial might be just as bad. If he secured the throne in Hell and set his sights on ruling Earth . . . She didn’t even want to think about the kind of damage that someone who looked like Belial could do to humanity. They already had enough fanatics running around. And that would be the worst of it; the Rules forbade Belial and his demons from hurting humans. But God knew what humans might do to each other in his name, and the Guardians wouldn’t be able to stop them. Any Guardian who tried and broke the Rules would have to Fall. Soon there would be no Guardians left—or they’d have to stand by and let it happen, focused purely on stopping the demons.

  “Not the same,” Savi said. “Anaria has joined the fray.”

  “Anaria?” She’d known that Michael’s sister intended to join the war. After Belial’s demons on Earth had slaughtered the nephilim—Anaria’s children—she’d sworn to kill Belial and avenge them. “But with the nephilim dead, she doesn’t have an army.”

  “She does now. Orange juice?”

  “I— What?” She glanced over at Colin, who stood beside a small table, a crystal decanter in hand and a brow arched. Most vampires couldn’t taste anything but blood. Thanks to the hellhound venom in Savi’s blood, these two could, and Colin was apparently still reveling in his renewed sense of taste. Taylor accepted a glass, primarily so that she could do something with her hands. “Where did she get an army? Did she convince a legion of demons to follow her?”

  Having experienced firsthand how compelling Anaria could be, Taylor wouldn’t have been surprised. When Anaria spoke, it took an effort to think of any opposing argument—and worse, Anaria made Taylor desperately want to believe her, even when Taylor fundamentally disagreed with her ideas. It was as if Anaria’s will and beliefs simply overrode her own.

  “Not demons,” Savi said, scooting over to make room for Colin to sit beside her. “She’s spent the past two and a half years recruiting everyone whose soul was released from the frozen field at the same time that Michael’s was. Hundreds of thousands of them.”

  Taylor frowned. “But they are just humans and halfling demons. And down there, they don’t have the protection of the Rules.”

  Humans were much weaker than demons, and even halflings—humans given demonic powers by Lucifer—weren’t as strong as the demons in Belial’s and Lucifer’s armies.

  “But unlike demons, they can’t die,” Colin said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Selah told us,” Savi explained. “She teleported down there to see what was happening. Demons were cutting through Anaria’s army, chopping off heads, slashing through their hearts—but it didn’t even hurt them. All of the demons who were cut down stayed down, though.”

  Taylor shook her head, trying to imagine . . . but Michael had said the same thing. He’d said that he couldn’t be killed in Hell. At least, not until they returned his soul to his body. And all of the humans and halflings in the frozen field were just souls, too. There was no body to kill, and the rest was truly immortal.

  “So Anaria is basically unstoppable,” Taylor realized.

  “In Hell, anyway, because her army couldn’t come to Earth. But they might be defeated in Hell, eventually. Lilith thinks that if they were burned in the Pit, they’d be released to . . . up there.”

  “Heaven, my sweet agnostic,” Colin said.

  “Or an alien mothership. We don’t know for sure.”

  They didn’t, but Taylor tended to agree with Colin. “But what about the demons who were in the frozen field? Are they unstoppable now, too?”

  “Nope. They’re just gone.”

  “Where?” Taylor had seen them all disappear when the frozen field cracked, but had no idea where they’d disappeared to.

  Savi shrugged. “Maybe to the demons’ version of Hell.”

  Maybe. Taylor supposed it didn’t matter, as long as they were gone. “So what happens if Anaria takes the throne? She could open the Gates, too.”

  And probably would, because Anaria was the very worst sort of “good.” She wanted everyone to be happy and joyful and kind—and she’d destroy anyone who dared not to be. And unlike Belial or Lucifer, she didn’t have to follow the Rules. The Guardians might be able to stop her—but as powerful as she was, and with an ability to compel people to follow her, Anaria could do a lot of damage to the world first.

  “No doubt she’d rid the world of vampire abominations,” Colin said dryly. “We ought to cheer for her.”

  Anaria considered them all a corruption, a human disease. And she already knew about Colin and Savi; they’d probably be first.

  No. All of the Guardians would be first, because they’d oppose her.

  “Jesus,” Taylor said. “There is no one to cheer for, is there? Lucifer will bring on the dragons and kill us all, Belial will put the whole world at war, and Anaria will crush us beneath her feet.”

  “Her tiny, perfect feet,” Savi agreed.

  “Is there any hope that they’ll all just kill each other off?”

  “I believe that is the hope—with Michael helping them along,” Colin said. “We’ve heard that he has been teleporting there often and slaying legions of them.”

  Because he wanted to burn them all. But Michael was no longer a dragon, and he only had swords. “That won’t be enough. What has Khavi been doing?”

  “No one really knows,” Savi said. “She pops in every once in a while, then leaves again.”

  “Does she say anything? How close are we to Hell breaking loose?”

  “We don’t know. Khavi sees it happening, though.”

  “Tomorrow? Next year? A thousand years from now?”

  “She sees all of the above, I think,” Savi said. “She says she doesn’t know.”

  And if Khavi did know, would she tell? She sure hadn’t mentioned the spear through Taylor’s chest. “Of course.”

  Savi opened her mouth again, hesitated, bit her lip.

  Taylor had to laugh. Savi’s curiosity had begun to bleed through her shields. Waiting even this long had probably almost killed her. “Go ahead and ask,” she said.

 
“What the hell happened to you down there?” Suddenly on her feet, Savi began pacing a path in front of the window seat. “All that anybody knows is that Michael is suddenly back, you’re in a freaking coma, and Khavi is afraid to show up in the same place as him.”

  “Really?” Apparently he didn’t like a surprise spear-through-the-chest, either.

  “Yeah, really. Then you pull a gun on him, and I have never felt you so scared. I really thought you’d shoot him.”

  “I hoped you would,” Colin said with a grin.

  Savi threw him a narrowed look before turning to Taylor again. “What in the world did he do?”

  “Ah, well.” Taylor appreciated Savi’s willingness to be outraged on her behalf, but she didn’t intend to fan that anger. Fortunately, her friend was easy to distract with details. “I was walking around, and Michael showed up as a big dragon just in time to save me from a hellhound. Then he ate it.”

  “Ate it?” Savi’s mouth dropped open. Even Colin looked a little squicked.

  “In about three bites. Then Michael shifted into his own body, and Khavi came and stabbed us both with the spear.”

  Savi stared at her. “But . . . where did the hellhound go? Why didn’t Michael explode when he shifted? How can all of that mass in his stomach just disappear?”

  “I know, right? I wondered that, too.”

  “And I prefer not to ponder such things.” Colin hadn’t been distracted, Taylor knew. He studied her face for a moment as if debating whether to ask everything that she hadn’t said. He finally continued, “Your psychic scent is different from before you left.”

  “A lot different?”

  “It is your own again—as it was when you were human.”

  So definitely no Michael in there, then. That was a relief.

  “And everything else is back to normal, too? Caelum’s been rebuilt, Michael’s in charge again . . .” She trailed off when Savi grimaced a little. “What?”

  “Caelum still lies in ruins,” Colin said. “And Irena still leads the Guardians.”

  “What?” Taylor stared at them, certain they must be joking, but Colin steadily returned her gaze and Savi appeared apologetic, as if she was sorry that they’d been the ones to tell her. “Why?”