Heart of Stone

by Christine Warren

  “But we’re only hoping the guy is a Warden,” she said, stilling the engine. “They don’t exactly publish a roster on Facebook, you know. I can tell you his buttload-of-greats-granddad was a Warden, but that’s hardly conclusive proof that he’s one, too.”

  “Then the best way to find out is to ask.” He stepped out of the car and slammed the door without another word.

  “Wow, he’s a charmer,” Ella muttered under her breath, hurrying to follow. God only knew what he would do when he got to the guy’s house. She wouldn’t put it past him to just kick down the door and invite himself the hell inside.

  Not that she could stop him, physically or magically, but she could at least keep a wary eye out for the cops.

  His long strides ate up the distance from the curb to Alan Parsons’s front door. It was a little after nine thirty at this point, but the lights at the front of the house burned brightly, and Ella could see evidence of more glowing through and around the curtains on several windows. At least at this hour she could reasonably hope they weren’t about to drag some poor soul out of his comfy bed.

  The house where Parsons lived couldn’t compete with Gregory Lascaux’s mountaintop estate, but Ella couldn’t immediately bring to mind a house that could. Versailles, maybe. With that said, the potential Warden appeared to live a very comfortable life.

  The house occupied an enormous lot at the dead end of a street filled with other enormous lots. It rose two stories amid a semicircle of tall pines and leafy trees with the carefully manicured appearance of wealth. Judging by a quick once-over, the occupant of the building, which had to measure a minimum of five thousand square feet, wasn’t hurting for money. Maybe this Warden gig paid better than Ella had assumed.

  A neat brick pathway curved gracefully from the sidewalk to the house’s front door. It seemed to demand better than the awkward scurry Ella had to use not to be left in Kees’s dust, but the gargoyle moved with the speed and determination of a bull toward a red cape. It was all she could do to keep up.

  She actually found herself panting when they finally stepped onto the small front porch—more of a portico, really. She reached for Kees’s arm, hoping to stall him long enough to ask that he let her do the talking, but he’d already banged his big fist on the slate blue door.

  Ella sighed and dropped her hand. “You realize there’s a doorbell, right?”

  He ignored her.

  The sound of movement inside the house distracted her, pulling her attention away from the uncooperative gargoyle. She could hear footsteps pause on the other side of the entry, and a moment passed before the knob began a slow turn.

  Ella fixed a smile on her face, aiming for harmless and pleasant. Maybe it would counteract Kees’s look of menace and power.

  The door opened, and a man stood in the entry. Of average height and build, he possessed a thick head of gray hair and bright blue eyes framed by GQ-fashionable glasses. He looked to be in his late sixties, still fit but beginning to show the signs of his age in his softening jawline and liver-spotted hands.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, his voice calm and polite.

  Giving herself a little test, Ella allowed her vision to blur and then refocus on an entirely different level. Her heart jumped and raced when the bright blue-white of strong magical wards appeared around the door of the home.

  She turned to tell Kees, which was why she witnessed the split second of power and shimmer that accompanied not a shift, but a momentary glimpse of the true shape behind his human disguise.

  Ella heard the old man gasp and quickly glanced his way, hoping she hadn’t misjudged him. She opened her mouth, reassurances dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she never spoke them. She didn’t get the chance.

  The man closed his eyes and seemed to sag in the open doorway. “You’ve come,” he nearly sobbed, the words filled with relief and joy and fear and frustration. “Thank the Fates. You’ve finally come.”

  Chapter Ten

  Fifteen minutes later, Ella found herself seated at a rustic wooden table in an enormous gourmet kitchen with her hands curled gratefully around a mug of steaming English tea. Alan Parsons, she had discovered, had been born in Kent, southeast of London. And yes, he was a Warden. For what that was now worth.

  “It’s bad. I can’t pretty it up for you. Things look very bleak.” Alan frowned across the table, the steam from his tea briefly fogging his glasses. “We knew the nocturnis had been stirring, and we’d lost a handful of Wardens, but the attack in Paris took us all by surprise. We weren’t even close to prepared.”

  Kees had refused the tea but accepted a large snifter of brandy. The delicate glass balloon looked almost comical cupped in his huge clawed hand. He had taken Alan seriously when their host had instructed them to “be comfortable.” He had shifted immediately.

  “Tell us,” the Guardian ordered, using the same flat, commanding voice Ella had learned to recognize during her lessons. “Everything. From the beginning. How did it start?”

  Alan glanced at Ella and frowned. “How much does she know?”

  “Just the basics. I found her less than a week ago, but she has potential. There’s magic in her, but the only training she’s had is what I’ve had time to give her in the last few days. I had hoped the Guild could take that over.”

  “Her name is Ella,” she reminded them with a snap, “and she doesn’t appreciate being talked around like a frog on a dissection table. I know about the Guild and obviously about the Guardians and the Wardens. I’m the one who tracked you down, so I think I can sit up here at the big people’s table and hear what’s what.”

  Alan’s mouth quirked and his eyes sparkled with humor. “Feisty. You’ll need to be.”

  He turned back to Kees and sobered. “There’s barely a Guild left to speak of, but let me go back further for you. About five years ago, the Guild began to make note of an increasing level of minor fiend activity. The guards seemed to be handling it, but it made some of us curious, especially since we first picked up on it in England, but quickly discovered it was not an isolated incident. It seemed to be happening all over the globe. That raised some eyebrows.”

  Kees nodded over his snifter, encouraging the Warden to continue.

  “We began to monitor the situation closely. It didn’t take long to trace the outbreaks of activity back to the Order.”

  Ella frowned, and then realized he must be talking about the nocturnis’ more formal name, the Order of Eternal Darkness.

  “New sects were discovered in England, Brussels, Slovenia, Brazil, and the United States. Brand-new cells, not replacing the ones we already knew existed in those areas, but augmenting them. The stones know where they got all those new recruits, but they found them somewhere. Before the fire, we estimated that their numbers had potentially doubled. Maybe more.”

  Kees cursed, and Ella felt a rush of unease. She might be new at all this, but that did not sound like good news.

  “Clearly, we knew something was going on, but we didn’t know what. And we were too slow in figuring it out. When the first Warden was killed, the death was made to look accidental, and no one took much notice, except to shake their heads at the unfortunate fact that he had had no children and his last apprentice had recently left to work in Paris. No one was immediately available to replace him. It didn’t cause too much worry, because he didn’t serve directly under a Guardian, so the need to replace him didn’t seem urgent.

  “The second and third death caused more concern. Again, those Wardens had no obvious successors in place, so that now left three positions in need of filling. That finally rattled some chains. Then Gregory died.”

  Ella saw Kees stiffen out of the corner of her eye. He’d told Alan the name of his former Warden, and she had noticed the fleeting look of sadness cross the old man’s face when he heard. Now she understood that he’d known about the death, but hadn’t realized Kees was Gregory’s Guardian until he heard it from Kees.

  A welling of sympathy made El
la soften. She reached out to place a hand over Kees’s, but he pulled away. Hiding the sting, she pulled back to lift her mug to her lips with both hands. Only sheer stubbornness kept them from shaking. The gargoyle didn’t want her sympathy. After all, it was a worthless human emotion. Fine. Next time, she’d remember.

  If Alan noticed the exchange, he didn’t comment. He merely continued with his tale.

  “Gregory was the first of the Guardian Wardens to die. The mundane officials ruled it a natural death, but we knew better by that point, and we definitely didn’t want to leave a Guardian unwarded. We never intended for you to be abandoned, Guardian. Please believe that.”

  Kees nodded, but his jaw flexed with tension.

  “We immediately sent a replacement to wake you and officially commit to your service. He never made it to you. His plane mysteriously crashed just after takeoff outside Prague. He and fifty other humans were killed.”

  “Nocturnis,” Kees hissed.

  “We have little proof, but it had to be. They picked off the Guardians’ Wardens one by one, and every time we tried to replace one, the replacement died as well. We had determined that only drastic action, a decisive counterstrike, could halt the killings, and plans were under way, but we were naïve. We didn’t believe they would dare to attack the Guild headquarters itself. Our pride and arrogance wiped out all of our eldest and most powerful members in one blow.”

  The agony in his voice pulled at Ella’s heart. She could hear the grief over all the friends and coworkers he had lost. He sounded like the victim of a terrorist attack. And he had been, she realized. Terror was exactly what the nocturnis had accomplished.

  “How many are left?”

  Ella turned and looked at Kees, startled. She’d never heard him sound like that before. His voice had deepened to a register like approaching thunder and carried the dark promise of blood and retribution. If she had met him for the first time at this moment, she would have run screaming. Right after she finished peeing her pants and passing out. He set his glass carefully away from him, which she figured was a good idea, considering he then clenched his fists so tight, she could see blood welling up around the tips of his claws. She also noted the signs of the war he waged to keep his expression stony. The tiny muscles around his lips and jaw twitched and quivered with the need to draw back, to bare his fangs in a roaring snarl of rage. Ella could almost hear it, like a distant echo in the back of her mind.

  This time, she didn’t allow him to brush her off. She grounded herself and laid her hand against the hot flesh of the gargoyle’s forearm. The muscles jumped under her touch, and he immediately tried to pull away. Stubbornly, she hung on. If she could ground magic, maybe she could ground other things as well. She could at least try. A deep breath filled her chest, and as she exhaled she cautiously worked to siphon the excess rage from Kees’s vibrating form.

  He froze, his gaze jumping to her face with obvious reluctance. As if she needed the reminder of how little he wanted her near him lately. Ignoring the heat of his regard, she continued to breathe in and out in a deliberately meditative rhythm. Within minutes, she felt the easing of his tension. He still felt rage—heck, he was filled with it—but Ella had lowered the heat from a rolling, bubbling, spewing boil to a low, intense simmer.

  Opening her eyes, Ella removed her hand and felt herself flush. She had realized she’d shut her eyes, but she knew she had a tendency to do so when she was concentrating hard on something magical. Kees had already warned her she would have to break the habit. She braced herself for another lecture.

  “That was remarkable,” Alan breathed, shattering the tense silence and drawing Ella’s gaze back to his weathered face. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Where did you learn such a thing, child?”

  Child?

  Ella tried not to take offense. She shrugged. “Kees taught me to ground. I loved it from the first minute. Things inside me got pretty chaotic before that. Grounding helps.” She glanced sideways at Kees and colored further. “I thought it might help him, too.”

  The gargoyle shook his head. “I taught her to ground the magic. This is something new.”

  Alan marveled. “I’ve never seen the like before. One being should not be able to ground for another. It just doesn’t happen that way. Grounding requires intense focus, for all its simplicity, and it is intensely personal. Each creature must learn to do it for himself. That was … extraordinary.”

  Ella shifted uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

  Kees shot her one last, intent look, then turned back to Alan. “We can worry about such things later. Tell me now, how many Wardens are left?”

  Still clearly surprised, Alan seemed to sink into his chair. All at once, he looked every minute of his age and older. Grief and worry sat heavy on his shoulders. “I wish I could tell you, but the truth is, I have no idea. After Paris, there was panic. With our center of operations wiped out, many of us lost touch with each other. Wardens talked about moving underground, going into hiding. No one wanted to be the next target, but I know the murders haven’t stopped. Our membership in the Guild and our magic have become the very things that make us vulnerable. The nocturnis can identify us too easily, and rumors are they get more names by torturing each victim before moving on to the next. None of us wants to give up our brothers, but we’re only human. We can be broken.”

  Ella shuddered and rapidly revised her opinion of the benefits of life as a Warden. Maybe she should stick to museum work.

  “Can you estimate?” Kees pressed. “You survived. Others must have done the same.”

  “I’m sure some did, but we don’t dare communicate. Every time we speak to each other is another opportunity for the nocturnis to find us.”

  “But how do you plan to regroup and rebuild if you cannot ever muster the courage to join together again? It will take the strength of many to bring the Guild back to life.”

  “There are too few of us overcome by too much fear. To fight this battle we need the Guardians. That’s why I gave thanks when I saw you on my doorstep. The only hope we have is for the Guardians to wake and go to battle. If you lead the troops, I know I will follow, and I believe others will as well, but at the moment, we are too vastly outnumbered. Only with you seven to champion us do we have any hope of success.”

  “Then the Guardians survive? The nocturnis have not destroyed them?”

  Alan sighed. “We don’t think so. As I said, none of them have Wardens any longer, but Guardians are extraordinarily hard to kill. That’s why you were summoned to battle the Seven. I’m certain that the ultimate goal of the Order is to destroy all of you, because then there would be nothing to stop them from freeing the Seven and unleashing the Darkness on the world. But for the moment, we think all the Guardians remain.”

  Ella finished her tea and pushed away her mug. “If you know you need the Guardians to fight off the nocturnis, why haven’t you guys gone and woken them all up? Kees tells me that’s part of the job description.”

  “It is, but things haven’t been so simple. The nocturnis clearly have a strategy. It took us a while, but we eventually realized that the first Wardens to die all came from areas where the new cells first formed. They would have been our early warning system. If they had survived, they would have reported on the upsurge in nocturnis activity, and the Guild might have taken steps, but they died before they were able to. After that, the Order went straight for the Wardens assigned to Guardians. Take them out, and the Guardians cannot be woken until they’re replaced. Kill the replacements, and they buy themselves more time without interference by the only force they truly fear.”

  It was a crazy line of logic: ruthless, brutal, and frighteningly effective. Ella grimaced.

  “I can say again that every time we’ve tried to replace a Guardian’s Warden, the Warden has not survived,” Alan said wearily. “Even now I hear rumors now and again of another of us emerging from hiding just to make the attempt, but every one ends in death. Plus, killing off the Warden
s created logistical problems as well.”

  “Logistical problems?”

  “Take Kees here.” Alan nodded at the gargoyle. “When we last had access to our records, he was safely housed at Gregory’s home in British Columbia, miles from any major areas of Order activity. Where did you find him?”

  “In Vancouver,” Ella admitted. “I work at a museum there, and they purchased him—er, they purchased the statue of a gargoyle from the estate of Gregory Lascaux about two years ago.”

  Alan nodded. “Exactly. As I said, the nocturnis strategized over this. They had elaborate plans that involved more than just killing Wardens. In every case, they either created some kind of legal gray areas around ownership or provenance of the Guardians’ stone forms, or they arranged for the statues to be moved or sold or lost once the Wardens were no longer there to guard their sleeping forms. We’ve lost track of them, though a few of us have been working on fixing that. None of them are where we last knew them to be. We have to find them before we can wake them, and once we find them, we have to reach them alive. Neither has been possible. Until now.”

  The Warden looked from Ella to Kees and frowned. “How were you woken, Guardian? Do you recall?”

  Kees barked out a humorless laugh. “One of the reasons we sought you out was so that you could explain it to us, Warden. All I remember was sleeping on the museum terrace until she walked by and got herself into trouble.”

  He pointed at Ella, who wanted to disappear under the table. Why did he make the story sound like an arrest report, damn it? From what she could tell, if she’d had any hand in waking Kees from his magical slumber, she’d done the world a pretty damned big—if unintentional—favor. The least the jerk could do was say thank you.

  * * *

  Kees watched as the little human’s cheeks flushed, then went pale, and then flushed again. The fact that she continued to fascinate him both angered and worried him. He had spent the past few days doing everything he could to erect barriers between them, but somehow she managed to bring them down without the slightest bit of force.