Heart of Stone

by Christine Warren

  Her voice broke and he could see the sobs threatening once more. He could see her begin to struggle for breath, and he was not going to let her sink back into that black bit of guilt again. Not now.

  “If you hadn’t poured an unreasonable number of beers down the throat of that stranger who hit your family’s vehicle head-on, none of it would have happened. Is that what you’re telling me, Ella?”

  “What? No.” She denied it, making it reflexive and sharp. “I had nothing to do with the other driver, but the magic was what made my father lose control. I remember the light filling the car and my parents screaming—”

  “It was night. The drunk was driving straight at you. You remember headlights. And screams from people who knew they might not survive the impact.”

  Still, Ella refused to cooperate. “No. The magic filled up the car. My mother even ducked, but I couldn’t pull it back. I was so angry with them. I thought they were betraying me, but they were only doing the best they could. They just wanted to help me.”

  “You didn’t need help, Ella. You needed training. You told your parents nothing but the truth about what you saw or what you could do. They just didn’t believe you. Maybe they were doing their best for you by treating you for some sort of mental disease, but I can tell you that what they planned would not have helped you. It would have made things worse. Drugs, disbelief, constantly being told you were wrong or insane, that you couldn’t really see or do what you knew you could. Even if they had convinced you, brainwashed you into believing it, you can’t lock the magic away forever. It will always find a way out. They could have killed you.”

  She dropped her head and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “But they’d be alive. My parents would still be alive.”

  “Would they?” Kees pushed harder. She needed to open her eyes and let go or she would never truly heal. She would never be strong enough for what they might have to face. Together. “If they had left you at the hospital that night and driven back home without you, would they have survived the trip? Or would the drunk still have swerved off his side of the road and hit them? Would they be dead anyway, with you left to the mercies of doctors who neither understood you nor loved you? No one would have been there to advocate for you, Ella. Your chances of surviving that ordeal would have been even lower.

  “And if you hadn’t survived, what would be happening right now?”

  Ella dropped her hands and wrapped her arms around her own waist. She looked cold and weary and utterly confused. Kees wanted nothing more than to tell her everything was all right and rock her back to sleep, but he couldn’t do it. Not yet. She was almost there, but he needed to push her just the last little way.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked wearily.

  “If you had been lost to the world because of psychiatric treatments that did more harm than good, or even if you had simply become permanently institutionalized, would you have been at the museum on that Friday night? Would I have woken, feeling a pull toward you that I have never felt in all my centuries? Or would I still be asleep?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter,” he snarled, startling her into looking at his face. “It matters a great deal. Wardens are dying every day, and the Guild has crumbled. The nocturnis gain strength every hour, and still my brothers sleep. The Order is attempting to keep them from waking by destroying those with the power to rouse us. If they succeed, eventually they will have the time and freedom to discover how to destroy us. Once the Guardians are no more, the Seven will rise, and the world will fall.”

  She stared at him, her brows drawn together in a frown of confusions.

  “You woke me, Ella, and because you did, I have been able to learn of the threat the nocturnis already pose to humanity. Because you woke me, we know what we are up against, and we have already begun the task of finding and waking my brothers. With Guardians to counter this threat, the Order may not succeed in their plans.” His voice softened. “You might very well save the world, little human.”

  “That’s crazy. We don’t—I mean … We don’t even know for sure that I really woke you. I didn’t do anything to make it happen, I was just there. It was an accident, and we have no way of knowing if I’ll be able to do it again with another Guardian.”

  “But you give us hope,” he said, cupping her cheek in his palm. She looked so fragile, her skin milky pale against his dark gray hand, his claws almost obscenely hard and sharp next to her softness. “You have made it possible for us to try to save ourselves, Ella. Without the sacrifices made that night during your childhood, we might already be doomed.”

  Ella snorted and bowed her head. “That’s some way of telling me to stop taking responsibility for the car wreck. By telling me to take responsibility for the possible end of the world.”

  She shuddered, and Kees drew her into his arms, cradling her against him. Her face pressed against his chest and he felt her tears wet his skin, but no sobs accompanied them. These tears came cleanly, finally bringing not more pain but acceptance.

  “No, little one,” he murmured, lowering his head. He wanted to curl himself around her, to keep her warm and safe forever. To show her she was loved. “You are responsible for neither. The accident that took your parents from you was just that—an accident. And while you can help save the world, the weight of that can never rest on your shoulders. The Guardians bear that responsibility. It is the very reason for our existence, why we were summoned, and why we remain in this realm.”

  Ella gave a half laugh and pulled back enough to look up at him. “So I’m not allowed to take responsibility for the whole world, but you are, huh?”

  Kees felt the corners of his mouth twitch and his heart squeeze and then melt. His Ella was coming back to him.

  “I am bigger,” he growled.

  And she laughed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ella slept most of the day. Since she’d had her soul wrung out like wet laundry by a very determined gargoyle in the wee hours around dawn, she had needed the extra rest. She would apparently need even more of it by the time Kees got finished with her.

  He had given her approximately half an hour after she’d crawled out of bed just before two in the afternoon to suck down a cup of coffee and remember her own name. As soon as she could answer that question, he pulled out the stack of books Alan had given her and began picking out spells.

  Her stomach had clenched reflexively when he told her they would use whatever time they had at the cabin until Fil contacted them with more info working on Ella’s spellcasting. Her mind instinctively screamed a denial. After all, the only two times she ever directed her magic with purpose, people had ended up dying. She didn’t ever want to risk doing that again.

  She had opened her mouth to refuse and found Kees watching her with steady, patient eyes, ones that glowed with both understanding and resolve. His eyes told her that he knew exactly what he was asking of her, and he had known what her first reaction would be. He would give her the time and the space to either disappoint him or make him proud.

  When she looked at the choice in those terms, it became easy.

  It became even easier when she remembered the nocturnis attacking him in her apartment. She couldn’t let herself become just a liability to her Guardian. She knew he had the skills to fight like a sharply honed instrument of destruction, and she also knew that if he had to worry about her all the time, he risked making himself vulnerable in the midst of a battle. If he were to be injured—or, God forbid, killed—because of her, Ella didn’t think she could take that guilt. Not again. Not after her parents. It would haunt her into the afterlife.

  She had dreamed vividly last night—this morning, really—and she knew it was her brain’s way of processing through all the emotion and memories she had dredged up last night. She had dreamed about the accident before, but this time, for the first time, instead of reliving the horror, she had been outside of the events, looking dow
n with the clinical detachment of a neutral observer. Details that she had missed as a furious and wounded twelve-year-old had jumped out at her. She had seen the approach of the other car, made note of the way it swerved and weaved in and out of traffic on the other side of the road. The driver had obviously been seriously impaired.

  Her heart had hurt when she saw the way her father had jerked and looked terrified when her magic spilled into the front seat, but he hadn’t lost control of the car. No, he had been trying to calm down Ella’s mother, talking to her soothingly when the drunk in the other car had crossed into the opposite lanes and come hurtling toward them. For the first time, Ella truly saw that the wreck had not been her fault. It had been just a tragic even that coincided with the worst moment of her life and managed to make it a million times worse.

  But Ella was not responsible. She never had been.

  So she had nodded to Kees, gathered herself, and picked up a spell book.

  When she’d first woken and remembered her dreams, along with the events of the night and the dawn, Ella considered thanking Kees for helping her through the memories and her own muddled emotions. That impulse faded quickly when he proceeded to become the most demanding taskmaster she had ever known.

  He worked her like a rented chain saw, pushing her from one spell to the next, giving her only minutes to familiarize herself with the intent and the wording before making her perform it. Then he would have her practice each spell over and over until she thought he ought to be worried about the idea of going to bed with her again. She’d probably be muttering spells and curses in her sleep after this.

  Hours flew by while Ella learned how to create and throw fire, how to deflect the energy of incoming spells—he threw frickin’ rocks at her for that one—and how to create a magical cage that could hold a person trapped within bars of energy visible only with mage sight. She still didn’t want to learn any death magic. Killing spells were off her list. She told Kees she could perform her rebound spell again, but to deliberately use magic to kill still made her uncomfortable, so he let it slide.

  He did, however, insist that she learn a few basic moves of physical self-defense. Using his human shape, he taught her how to break out of a captor’s grip in a number of common holds. He showed her the vulnerable spots on a human’s anatomy—both male and female, even though Ella had started to assume that like the Wardens, the nocturnis were a bunch of backwards chauvinists—and taught her how to make a blow count in spite of her small size and limited physical strength.

  All Ella could think was that she should have gone to the gym more often.

  The sun had begun to dip toward the treetops when Kees gave his last lesson. He began to talk to her about demons.

  “The Seven, pray to the Light, you will never see. They are the oldest of their kind, and the most dangerous. They have no thoughts, no emotions, no shape but pure evil. When they join together, they form the Darkness, and if that happens, our war is all but lost.

  “But there are demons of other sorts, ones less powerful and more easily controlled. These are the ones the nocturnis may draw into our realm to aid in their plans. These beings should not be underestimated. Though their power cannot be compared to one of the Seven, they still have the ability to kill even a squad of well-armed human soldiers without thought or mercy.”

  Ella shot him a peevish glance. “Gee, and I could wind up meeting one? Bully for me.”

  “If you do meet one, you should call for me. I will stand against it and slay it. That is my purpose.”

  “Right, but what if you’re busy? What do I do then? Politely ask it to wait until you’re free to come deal with it?”

  “You think I would abandon you in battle? That I would not stay right by your side and protect you from all danger?”

  His insulted roar made Ella roll her eyes. “No, that’s not what I think. What I do think is that shit happens and after watching one or two movies in my life, I think even more shit happens in the heat of battle. So I’d just like a little more to go on than, ‘If you see a demon, wait for me to rescue you.’ Sorry if that offends.”

  Kees’s expression hardened. “You cannot stand alone against a demon. Even a fully trained Warden would not try without two or three others by his side. Even for the weakest of their kind. The most minor demons can be destroyed, but it requires enormous power.”

  “Fine, then I won’t try to destroy it, but I would like to have the option of holding it off by some method more reliable than running away. I’m not that fast, or that graceful. With my luck, I’d trip over something and end up demon chow before you could swoop in and save the day.”

  Kees growled something under his breath, but he relented and found two spells in the texts and one in the grimoire that might prove useful. One was a variation on a warding spell, and that one looked easy, considering she already had a pretty good handle on standard wards and barriers. Rather than sealing off a space that others could not enter, the spell created a boundary others could not exit. It was like a magic invisible bubble that trapped the user inside. And even better, it had a reflective interior, so magic cast from inside could not pierce the boundary. Put it around another mage, and that mage couldn’t cast a counterspell to dissolve it. On demons, it worked like a summoning circle, keeping them inside, but it didn’t last as long as with mages and mortals. Eventually the demon’s evil would eat away at the barrier and allow it to slip free.

  The second spell allowed the mage who cast it to close a portal on a summoned demon. That one was trickier, because it still left you facing an angry demon. Or even parts of an angry demon, since there was a note that said if a demon had partially made it through the portal, that part would remain on earth with a level of power commensurate with the amount of it not contained on the other plane.

  That just sounded gross.

  The third spell came from the grimoire, and sounded both the most effective and the most dangerous. In it, the caster bound the demon to something on the mortal plane, like a rock or a tree or a man-made object. Once the demon was bound, it would share the vulnerabilities of the object. It if were bound to glass, it could be shattered; to wood, it could be burned. And remains, like shards or ask, could be swept up and stored in a container, then buried in a hole filled with salt. The demon would be trapped in that prison forever.

  Ella immediately committed all three spells to memory. She would have liked to practice them as well, but by the time she looked up from the books, the sun was already sinking below the trees. No wonder the text had been so hard to make out.

  “Come.” Kees picked up the other books and their sparring tools and turned toward the cabin. “We should eat. Later you can continue to practice.”

  “Right. Because I’m not just a regular human anymore, so I don’t need to worry about stuff like rest and recuperation.”

  Her words had been muttered under her breath, but the damned gargoyle heard her anyway.

  “You can rest later. For now, practice.”

  She stuck her tongue out at his retreating back.

  Trudging up the steps and into the cabin, she almost missed the faint sound of her cell phone ringing as it drifted from the bedroom. She had to dash to reach it before the voice mail picked up. The screen told her who was on the other end of the line.

  “Fil,” she said. “You there?”

  “I’m here. Just starting to wonder if you were, though.”

  “Sorry, I was in the other room and I forgot to bring the phone with me. D’you have news for me?”

  “Sure do. I found your piece!”

  Ella immediately looked around for Kees and waved him over. He finished lighting the fire in the hearth and joined her next to the cabin entrance. “Fil, you are amazing. Where is it?”

  Kees watched her closely, and she could see from his expression that he was picking up both sides of the conversation.

  “Well, it’s not on display anywhere, but I lucked out and stumbled on it by accident. That’s
the only reason I’m able to get back to you so fast. Turns out it just arrived in town. The Ste. Celeste Museum acquired it from a private seller in Budapest like two months ago. The plane carrying it literally landed on Friday. It’s still going through prep and waiting for the display space to be ready. I think they plan to place it in their gardens.”

  “You’re the best. Seriously. I owe you so big for this.”

  “Hey, we already worked out the price, sweetie. Don’t go trying to haggle now.”

  “Trust me, I’ll pay it and still be in your debt.”

  “Cool. Hey, listen.” There was a pause, and Felicity’s voice came back sounding slightly unsure. “I can see why your director would be upset to lose a piece like this, El. It’s … well, it’s pretty amazing. The condition is unbelievable. If it didn’t come with a stack of provenance paperwork thicker than my front door, I’d be sure it was a fake. I mean, that thing needs not a single bit of restoration that I could see. It’s almost creepy.”

  Ella forced a laugh. “Creepy? Why? Because if more art were like that, you’d be out of a job, right?”

  “Har-har. No, I mean it, El. This thing is weird. You gotta trust me on this.” She paused, and her voice lowered. “The way I trusted you.”

  Memories of that night after the library sneaked up on Ella. She remembered Felicity’s calm reaction, her easy acceptance. Was there more to easy, breezy Fil Shaltis than Ella had thought?

  “Anyway, just be careful,” Fil said, her tone returning to normal. “On general principle, if nothing else.”

  “You got it.”

  “Good. So is there anything else I can do for you? I’ve been saving up vacation time, so I can extort you for another couple of weeks, easy.”