Stone Cold Lover

by Christine Warren

  Looking down at her left hand, she could see no evidence of the magical blow she’d inadvertently warded off. The sensation of swelling, heat, and stabbing needles wasn’t supported by outward appearances. Her skin looked unmarred, the back of her hand smooth and pale in the dim starlight. Even her palm appeared fine—at worst a little pink in the middle where she’d felt the point of impact.

  She shook her head and pushed aside the concern. “My hand is fine, and it’s not even the one I paint with. Right now I’m a little more worried about my mental state. Unless you can offer some sort of logical explanation for your existence, statue boy.”

  For the first time in her life, Fil got to see what it looked like to actually ruffle someone’s feathers. The giant next to her shifted his wings in what struck her as a gesture of irritation, creating a whisper of breeze in the air.

  “I am no statue,” he growled, the tip of one fang flashing as his lip curled. “I told you, I am a Guardian, defender of humanity against the evil of the Darkness. My sleeping form may resemble something carved by human hands, but I can assure you my brothers and I are entirely different.”

  “Guardian. Darkness. Brothers,” Fil repeated. “I recognize those words, but I have the feeling they do not mean what I think they mean.”

  She shivered hard, as if she’d been lifted by the scruff of the neck like a puppy and shaken. She was definitely suffering from shock. What she wouldn’t give for an EMT with a survival blanket. Hell, at this point she doubted she’d argue too hard against a nice white coat with buckles in the back. She was freezing.

  Next to her, the monster—statue, Guardian, whatever—frowned and reached toward her. Instinct had her pulling back warily, but instead of grabbing her he simply draped a layer of heavy wool over her shoulders and tucked it carefully around her. Since he wore about as much as your average Chippendales dancer, she had no idea where he’d gotten such a thing, but she just pulled it tighter and decided not to ask. When you were wondering about how huge chunks of rock managed to come to life and start talking, somehow the origins of a little blanket seemed less important.

  “Thanks, Rocky,” she murmured, eyeing him warily. “Now, unless you’re planning to whip out some graham crackers and marshmallows and build us a nice little campfire, how about you define those words that seem to be tripping me up.”

  “My name is Spar. I am neither called Rocky nor made of rock. I am a Guardian, one of those warriors who were summoned to battle against the seven demons of the Darkness and to prevent their possible return to this human plane of existence. I consider the others of my kind to be my brothers.”

  Above the fiery blackness of his eyes, his brows drew together, and Fil couldn’t help providing the mental sound effect of stone scraping against stone. No matter what he said, he sure looked like he’d been carved straight out of a rock. A voice in the back of her head pointed out that despite the hardness of his muscles, his tough skin had felt way too warm and intriguing to be stone. She ignored it.

  “The Darkness is…” He paused and shook his head. “It is the Darkness. It is that which devours the Light. Humans have called it evil, but that word is simple. It does not encompass the whole truth. Darkness is evil, but it is evil so pure and so deep that it creates an entire absence of good. Good cannot exist in the Darkness, not even to struggle against it. It is consumed to fuel the spread of the enemy. Nothing can exist within it. Not life itself.”

  Fil felt his words sink in. This time when she shivered, it had very little to do with shock. It was a visceral reaction to the total annihilation of existence she’d just heard described.

  “That sounds … nasty,” she finally said, tugging her blanket tighter. “But, um, I’m not sure it explains how you managed to be a statue one minute and a—a—a … a you the next.”

  Spar didn’t get the chance to respond. Under the blanket, a chime started, a ringing of bells that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at the abbey they had recently left behind. Fil’s phone was ringing.

  Habit had her reaching into her pocket and glancing at the screen to see who was calling. When she read the name at the top of the window, she nearly laughed. Tapping the ANSWER key, she held the phone up to her ear and narrowed her eyes.

  “Well, well, well,” she purred, her gaze still fixed on her stony companion. “If it isn’t Miss Ella Harrow, my old pal. What’s new, El?”

  “Fil! Thank God I got you!” Ella sounded as if she’d just discovered a tornado was coming and her friend was her only ride out of town. “I just saw the news. They said there was an explosion at the Abbey of St. Thomas. They thought it might be a bombing. Isn’t that where you told me they had the gargoyle statue?”

  “Yup. That’s the place.”

  “Oh, God, Fil, please, please don’t tell me the statue was destroyed! Do you know? Have you heard anything?”

  Fil heard the urgency in her friend’s voice and felt something click into place. All her feelings that there was something weird about the statue had obviously been right on the money, and now she had a pretty good idea that Ella had known more than she’d let on. The other woman sounded more like she was trying to find out if someone she knew had been injured in an explosion than like she was checking up on a work of art she thought might be related to one she had formerly curated.

  “Have I heard anything about what, El?” she asked. “About the explosion? Well, I haven’t seen the news, but that might be because I was there when the bomb went off. Or maybe I was just distracted by finding out that the statue you asked me to locate turned out not to be a statue at all.”

  She heard her friend gasp and managed a narrow smile.

  “By the way, Spar says hello. And I say, Ella, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.”

  Chapter Three

  For a moment, the only sounds Fil could make out were the chirps of insects and the beating of her own heart. Then Ella let out a deep breath and whispered into the phone.

  “He’s awake, isn’t he?”

  Fil felt a flush of irritation. Since Ella couldn’t see her, she glared at Spar instead, which was almost as good.

  “Yes, Ella. He’s awake. He’s not logically possible, of course, but he’s up and moving, his name is Spar, apparently, and a few minutes ago he grabbed me and flew me across the city to what looks like one of the islands in the Saint Lawrence. So now might be a pretty good time to tell me what the hell is going on around here.”

  “This is really a conversation we should have in person.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly in a position to fly to BC at the moment, pal, so unless you happen to be paying an impromptu visit to my fair city, ‘in person’ is not going to happen. Now spill.”

  She heard a rustling noise, then what sounded like a muffled conversation in the background. After a moment, her friend came back with, “I need to see you, and there are things you need to see on my end, too. How soon can you get to a computer with Skype?”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, El, and I’m using a smartphone. You want to video chat, we can do that right here.”

  “All right. I’ll call you right back.”

  The call disconnected, and Fil blew out a breath of frustration. “This is not the night I signed up for,” she muttered, staring at her phone and waiting for the video call to come in.

  “You are taking a telephone call?”

  Spar asked the question in an even tone, but Fil could feel the disapproval behind the words, even if she hadn’t been able to see the faint shadings of irritation in his aura.

  “It’s not like I’m chatting with my sorority sister about the latest style trends,” she snapped. “Ella is the one who sent me looking for you in the first place, and it’s becoming pretty damned clear she knew something about you before she did. Frankly, she owes me some downright heavy-duty explanations right about now.”

  He folded his arms over his chest and settled farther down on his haunches. “Your friend knows of my kind. Is she a Warde
n?”

  “A what-den?”

  “A member of the Guild,” he added, as if that clarified things.

  Fil rolled her eyes. “Two species separated by a common language,” she paraphrased under her breath. She nearly jumped when the phone in her hand chimed again. This time, when she answered the call, Ella’s familiar face filled the screen.

  “Okay, El,” she bit out, staring into her friend’s troubled gray eyes. “Now would be a really good time to tell me what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is going on here.”

  “I will, Fil, I promise. But first there’s something you need to see.”

  Before Felicity could protest, Ella shifted out of the picture and the camera panned over to focus on someone else. Or rather, something else.

  The image on the screen halted Fil’s breath in her throat. An angelic male face peered back at her with eyes blacker than pitch, lit from behind with a thousand fires. They made Fil think of lava flows, molten-red in the cracks, but topped with a crust of obsidian.

  The eyes were set in a face that looked as if it had been carved from granite, and if that wasn’t enough for her to make the connection, the skin like stone and the horns curving back from the rugged brow would have tipped her off. The man on the screen could have been Spar’s brother. In fact, Fil would have bet a year of her life that was exactly who he was.

  “His name is Kees.” Ella’s voice came from out of frame, but Fil had no trouble making out the words. “He’s a—”

  “A Guardian,” Fil finished, feeling grim. “Let me guess. Could he possibly be the ‘statue’ that was supposedly stolen from the Vancouver Museum of Art and History just a few short weeks ago?”

  Ella shifted back into the picture, sharing the space with the enormous creature beside her. Something in the way the woman leaned against the Guardian’s massive chest sent a stirring of something through Fil, but she ignored it. She had bigger things to worry about right now.

  “He is,” Ella confirmed with a nod. “But I think you know by now that Kees was never a statue. Not really. He was just sleeping.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like there was a lot of that going around.” She sighed and shook her head. “Well, let me be the one to get the reunion started. Kees, this is Spar. Spar, I have a feeling you know Kees.”

  Fil handed the phone to the creature beside her. Another time, she might have laughed at the way his giant hands fumbled with the small piece of technology, but her head had begun to ache way too much to risk it. The way she felt right now, the damned thing might explode on her at the smallest chuckle.

  Spar scowled down into the screen, moving the phone back and forth toward his face as if trying to zoom in the picture. “Kees? Is that you, my brother?”

  “It is,” the other Guardian snarled. “For the sake of the Light, will you hold still before you make us both dizzy?”

  “You look so small. I can hardly see that it is you. Why do you not come closer so that I might view you more easily?”

  “I am on the other side of the continent at the moment, my friend,” Kees explained. “What you see is a transmission of my image. This technology is new to you, I take it. When was the last time you woke?”

  “They told me the year was 1789. A great human slaughter began that fed one of the Seven too well. It began to stir, and I was summoned to send it back to its prison.”

  “I trust you succeeded, for I was never called to aid you. Were any of the others?”

  “Of course not. I handled it myself, as I was charged to do.” Fil watched as Spar’s expression grew even more fierce. “What is the meaning of this, brother? Why have both of us awoken together? Why have I awoken at all? I cannot feel the presence of one of the Seven. The Darkness poses no immediate threat of escape from its shackles. So what is going on?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.” Fil stepped forward and laid her hand over Spar’s, directing the camera until it captured both of their images. “I don’t care who explains it to me, El, you or your pal there, but I definitely want to know what’s going on and why my new reality has to stretch to include talking statues and terms like the Darkness, with a capital D.”

  “It’s a really long story.”

  Fil glanced at the clock on her phone and raised an eyebrow. “Well, El, it’s two twenty-seven in the morning, and I seem to be sitting the middle of a provincial park with a creature out of a book of fairy tales, so quite frankly I can’t think of anyplace else I need to be at the moment. Start talking.”

  * * *

  Spar watched the human female—Fil, her friend had called her, though he found the masculine name ridiculous—as she listened to her friend relate the story of his kind. He found her face fascinating. Each of her thoughts passed over it in succession. Perhaps it was the purity of her features that made them so easy to read, for she had the finely drawn look of a Madonna: small, straight nose, clear brow, rounded cheeks, and a mouth like Cupid’s bow. Her skin could pass for porcelain in the faint illumination of her mobile phone, and her wide green eyes bore a fringe of lashes a hundred shades darker than her pale-blond hair. She looked like walking innocence. Of course, Spar acknowledged to himself, when she opened her mouth she sounded like something entirely different.

  He studied her while the one called Ella repeated a familiar tale. Thousands of years ago in the face of great evil, a group of powerful magic users—mages—banded together to summon forth a power capable of defeating the demons who formed the Darkness. Seven immortal warriors were called, one for each of the demons they would combat, and the mages named them the Guardians, because their purpose was to guard humanity from the servants of evil.

  The mages quickly learned, however, that the Seven demons of the Darkness could not be entirely destroyed. They were formed from the Dark itself, and so would exist forever in the same way that the Light would exist forever. In order to contain them, they were separated from one another to prevent them from feeding on one another’s power, and each was banished to a desolate plane where they were imprisoned.

  Knowing of the potential for the Seven to return, the mages made the decision to remain united and form the Guild of Wardens in order to monitor the ongoing threat from the Darkness. They gathered and shared knowledge of the enemy, assisted the Guardians with tools and support needed to battle, and monitored the activities of humans seduced or enslaved by Dark powers. The Wardens bore the ultimate responsibility for alerting the Guardians when they needed to rise and face a renewed threat, and they also acted to send the warriors back to sleep when the threat was vanquished. Even during those periods of slumber, the Guild remained vigilant against the forces of the Darkness.

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Ella concluded, “but Kees and I have discovered a problem. A big one.”

  “We believe the nocturnis have developed a new strategy,” Kees explained. “Ella and I discovered that over a year ago, a fire destroyed the headquarters of the Guild of Wardens in Paris. Twenty-three of the members, including most of the inner council, died in the blaze.”

  Shock tore Spar’s attention from the intriguing human to his brother’s image on the small screen. “Impossible. You are mistaken, brother. Fire could never destroy those who can shape it to their will.”

  Kees set his jaw. “It can if Dark magic fans the flames. The human authorities were eager to label the fire accidental, the fault of antiquated wiring in a historic building, but you and I know that such accidents do not befall the Wardens. We know the nocturnis must have been behind it. But that is not the end of the story.

  “When I awoke in this time, I tried to seek out my own Warden,” Kees continued, “the descendant of the family that served at my side for more than a thousand years. Ella and I found that he, too, had been murdered.”

  A chill of foreboding and the heat of rage clashed in Spar’s chest. “You believe the nocturnis are hunting the members of the Guild.”

  “We know they are.” Ella’s voice sounded grim and tou
ched with pain. “We managed to track down one remaining Warden in the northwestern United States, and he confirmed our suspicions. For at least the past five years, the Guild has been aware of an increase in the activity of minor fiends all over the world. It was clear that the Order was behind it all.”

  Fil interrupted with a frown. “The Order?”

  “The Order of Eternal Darkness,” Ella said. “It’s the formal name for the group we refer to as the nocturnis. The Guild discovered that the Order had been making a vast push to expand, not just inducting members into its established sects, but founding new ones as well. Dozens of them. Maybe more. They monitored the situation, of course, but they waited too long to act, because that’s when the Wardens began dying.”

  Spar uttered an oath in a language that had been dead more than a thousand years. It didn’t help.

  “Go on,” he bit out. Hearing the story stabbed at him like a poisoned blade, but he needed to hear it. He needed to know the extent of the threat he faced, because this, he reasoned, must be the summons that had awoken him.

  “The first few to die looked like accidents.” Kees picked up the thread and continued. “Even though the casualties always seemed to be Wardens without immediate successors in place, the need to replace them never seemed quite urgent enough to worry anyone. Until Gregory Lascaux.”

  The bite of fury underlying his brother’s tone provided the key to Spar’s memory. Names could change over the centuries, but in this case he didn’t think coincidence played a part.

  “The Lascaux family once belonged to you,” he said, watching Kees’s expression in the phone. The mixture of anger and grief confirmed his suspicions.

  “They did. Gregory was my personal Warden, though we met few times during his tenure. I thought things were too peaceful to need my attention. Instead I woke to find that the nocturnis had developed a new strategy to defeat us, one that involved dismantling our support network in order to weaken us.”