Hard to Handle

by Christine Warren

  “Interesting word, that.” Drum swirled the liquor in his glass and fought to keep his voice level. “I have a feeling that to you and me, ‘unacceptable’ has two very different meanings.”

  “I disagree. I do not believe that you wish to risk the lives of yourself, your people, or your family. I do not believe you wish to encounter more of the types of creatures that serve the Darkness. I do not believe you wish for this world to end. I think that we would both call all of those things unacceptable.”

  Ash met his gaze and held it. Behind the blackness of her eyes, the flame burned steadily, barely flickering. Her gaze wasn’t human, far from it, but he recognized it. The resolve, the strength, the need for justice, all of it seemed very human. Contained within something other, he could see all the best traits of humanity.

  Better than his own.

  The realization hit him like a fist to the gut. If he had that resolve, that strength, or that dedication to justice, he wouldn’t be arguing with her now. He wouldn’t hesitate. He would have the courage to do the thing that no one else could, and worry about the consequences later.

  The last of the whiskey tasted sweet and bitter on his tongue and left him feeling not warmed, but chilled. He’d been trapped. No matter what he decided, he would pay for it in the end. If he did as his sister and the Guardian asked, he would face all of the problems he had already envisioned, and they would follow him for the rest of his life. But if he refused, his own cowardice would haunt him. One was his rock, the other his hard place.

  In the end, his decision wasn’t noble. He just decided that he’d rather blame his future misery on someone other than himself.

  “Fine. I’ll give it a try, but I make no guarantees.”

  Maeve lit up like sunrise. “You don’t have to, Michael. You’ll be brilliant. I know it.”

  Only because he still had his eyes on Ash’s face did he see the flicker of surprise. She had expected him to stick to his refusal. Whether she thought him that stubborn or that cowardly, he ought to be insulted, but he couldn’t manage it. Not when he realized how epically, drastically tired he really felt.

  Damn it all, he was even too tired to yawn.

  “At least one of us does,” he said, glancing at his sister. “But it will have to wait. Right now, I’m too bloody fagged to find my own arse with both hands and GPS.”

  Maeve pulled out her phone and glanced at the screen. Her eyes went wide. “Good Lord, and it’s no wonder. It’s nearly three in the morning. I had no idea it could be so late. I should have passed out ages ago. And Ma was expecting me tonight.”

  Drum gathered up the empty glasses—and Ash’s full one—and dumped them in the sink behind the bar. “It’s too late to drive out there now. We’d wake the whole house. And besides, I’d never be able to keep my eyes open. You can sleep upstairs and take the bus in the morning.”

  And then, as if she hadn’t caused him enough trouble that night, his sister slid off the table and looked up at him with her big, blue eyes. “What about Ash?”

  He froze. “What about her?”

  Maeve wore the expression that said she thought he was an idiot. She’d been using it since her cradle. “Where will she stay?”

  “How should I know? Where she usually does, I suppose.”

  “Weren’t you listening? She doesn’t usually do anything. She’s new here.”

  Drum saw another trap looming and looked around for something to spring it with, other than his own cursed tongue. “Mae, weren’t you looking? She’s a gargoyle.”

  A gargoyle who growled, “She is standing right here.”

  Maeve braced her hands on her hips. “What? So, she should go stand in the garden for the pigeons to roost on?”

  “Mae—”

  His sister ignored him. As usual. “Come on.” Maeve waved to Ash and headed for the door marked PRIVATE. “We can share the spare room. Michael’s flat is right upstairs. One or another of us girls is always crashing here, so we make sure the linens are always fresh.”

  Drum watched, utterly helpless, as Maeve worked to arrange the world to her own liking. At least he was smart enough not to protest aloud when Ash looked his way before falling in behind his sister. He kept his screams in his head, and had the strained jaw muscle to prove it.

  The women disappeared into the back, the faint sound of their footsteps on the stairs reaching him in the silence of the taproom. He felt sure they would make themselves very comfortable in the twin beds of the spare room under the eaves. They’d probably sleep like babies. After all, they weren’t the ones looking forward to tomorrow as a date with the gallows. That was all on Drum.

  He groaned and returned to his chair, letting his upper body slump onto the table.

  Where had he left that bottle of Jameson?

  Chapter Five

  Ash had no desire to sleep. She had only just awoken, and she knew that the fate of her kind was to sleep through the passage of centuries. She felt no compulsion to start early.

  Still, it would have been rude to protest against the fussing of the human female. Maeve kept up a steady stream of cheerful chatter that belied her avowals of exhaustion. As she spoke, she led Ash up a narrow set of stairs at the rear of the building to a heavy wooden door secured with a dull brass lock. A set of keys drawn from her pocket allowed them access into a small foyer, lined on the floor with shoes and on one wall with jackets and sweaters dangling from a row of pegs.

  The space opened up into a large living area with pale walls and lots of dark oak trim. It outlined a square arch to left, through which appeared to be a kitchen, and to closed doorways on the right. The rear wall was lined with four tall, rectangular windows through which a bit of weak moonlight filtered in through the misty rain. A faded rag rug covered an area in the center of the scuffed pine floor, with a long battered sofa, a pair of well-stuffed chairs, and a low table positioned on top.

  “Through here,” Maeve said, opening the first of the closed doors. “I need to find myself a bed so I don’t accidentally break something when I keel over.”

  Ash had a moment of worry until she saw the smile the other woman aimed in her direction. She must have intended the statement to be humorous. Ash needed to remember she was dealing with humans. They could be tricky to understand.

  She followed Maeve down a short hall to another door, which opened into a cozy room under the eaves of the old building. Another rag rug, this one smaller and more brightly colored, covered the floorboards between two narrow beds pressed against the walls on the right and left. Opposite the door, a window looked out to the alley beside the pub, but the only real source of light came from the frosted glass fixture overhead that blinked on when Maeve flicked a switch beside the door.

  The room was small and slightly chilly, but the quilts on the beds looked thick with down, and their patchwork tops boasted colors just as bright as the ones in the rug. The small table in between held a lamp with a pretty yellow shade trimmed in eyelet lace. At a touch of Maeve’s hand, it glowed with a soft golden light.

  “The bathroom is the next door down,” Mae said, bouncing down onto the bed on the left. “I would show you, but now that I’ve sat, I’m not certain that I can get up again. I really am knackered.” She gave a quick laugh.

  “I am certain I could find it if I should have need,” Ash assured her.

  She stood just inside the door and looked around the room, feeling awkward and unsure what to do next. She felt no fatigue, and though the beds looked comfortable and warm, the idea of lying on one and remaining motionless for several hours held little appeal.

  It would not do, however, to be rude to her hostess. Following Maeve’s lead, she crossed to the opposite bed and perched gingerly on the edge. Across the way, the human woman had pulled off her shoes, wriggled out of her denim trousers, and crawled beneath the heavy quilt.

  “You have to forgive me for being so rude,” Maeve mumbled through a yawn, “but I really can’t keep my eyes open another minute.
Sleep well, Ash. I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll get Michael to do his thing. Promise.” Two minutes later her breathing settled into the soft, steady rhythm of sleep.

  Ash continued to sit there for several minutes and watch her sleep. She didn’t know what else to do. She was a warrior who couldn’t find the battlefield, and off it, her purpose became unclear. The only foe she could see at the moment was uncertainty, and against that, her axe was useless.

  A Guardian should be better at waiting. Of course, a Guardian should be a lot of things that Ash wasn’t. Like male.

  Ash frowned into the distance. The thought bothered her more than she wished to admit. Not the fact of being female, but what the knowledge that she was might signify.

  Her brow furrowed as she reviewed in her head the anomalies she had encountered since waking. The first was clearly the manner of her waking; a Guardian should only wake when being summoned at the hands of a Warden. So it had been from the first, and for something so fundamental to have changed indicated a disturbance at the very foundation of their existence. She could think of no reason for a Guardian to wake on her own unless no Warden existed to wake her.

  The thought sent a chill down her spine. While each of the seven existing Guardians was served by a single Warden, the Guild itself boasted several hundred additional members, each of whom was a fully trained Warden in his own right. If a Warden in service were to die or be killed, another immediately took his place. Usually such positions passed along family lines, but they were never left vacant. Service to, and the summoning of, the Guardians was too important a task to allow for such carelessness. Could the fact that no Warden had greeted her awakening mean there was no Warden available? How could such a thing be possible as long as the Guild existed?

  Then, there was the matter of the purpose for which she had been summoned. Her waking indicated a serious and immediate threat from the Darkness. Filling her in on the details of that threat would have been her Warden’s first and most important task. He would have told her what the threat was, who posed it, and where to find the nocturnis or Demon behind it. Without that information, Ash was—half literally—flying blind.

  The fact that she was female made for a subtler, but no less puzzling, question. Ash knew her own skills and strengths quite well. She knew her sex played no part in her ability to battle and defeat any enemy who stood against her. She wielded no less power than the next among her brothers and would perform her duty with equal determination and success.

  But that didn’t make her existence any less of an aberration. The first female Guardian. Ever.

  Why? she brooded.

  Not only had a female Guardian never before existed, one of the most significant and sacred of the tales about their origin involved the relationship between the male Guardians and human females. The human female of power, one with abilities beyond the ordinary—like Maeve’s precognition—was, in fact, at the center of the story of how the Seven Demons of the Darkness had been imprisoned the last time they had all broken free. She was also the key to freeing a male Guardian from the endless cycle of waking and sleeping that defined his existence. Such a female could become the Guardian’s mate and their bond would allow him to retain his human shape forever, at the sacrifice of his immortal life span and inhuman abilities. In other words, love could transform the beast into the man.

  But where did that leave Ash?

  The questions tumbled around in her mind like pebbles at the ocean’s edge. She had no answers, though, and continuing to ponder seemed unlikely to provide her with any. Taking care to keep silent, she rose from the bed and slipped out the door into the narrow hall.

  The dim space was lit only by the glow coming from the living room at the front of the flat. With nothing else to do, Ash padded toward it and found herself back in the welcoming space. The empty room and the late hour gave her ample opportunity to explore.

  She discovered after only a few seconds that Michael Drummond didn’t have all that much to look at, at least not in this common space. Aside from the sofa, table, and chairs, the only furniture was a tall, dark bookcase that leaned against the wall near the entry. Nearly every shelf was crammed with titles, some paperback, some hardcover, and a few here and there bound in worn leather. She didn’t recognize any, not that she would have, but the titles indicated an eclectic taste. A few pockets of space not occupied by books held an odd miscellany of objects—a rusted buckle attached to a frayed strap of leather, a framed photograph of four smiling women with their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders and another of a man and a woman who leaned against each other as they smiled, a handful of chipped and pitted coins that looked as if they had been dug from the earth. None of it said much about the place’s occupant.

  Ash found herself frustrated, and then found herself surprised by the frustration. She realized she had been looking for something that would allow her to understand this human called Michael Drummond. She wanted insight into what made the man tick, or at least that was what she told herself. Then it occurred to her that what she really wanted to understand was her own reaction to the man.

  The realization knocked her off balance. The idea that a human male should cause her to react in any way at all mired her thinking like quicksand. She was not here for the sake of any one human, but for humanity as a whole.

  Humanity as a whole, though, didn’t leave her feeling angry, confused, and fascinated against her will.

  Ash spun away from the bookcase, and the edge of her wing caught a precariously perched volume, knocking it to the floor. Human dwellings were clearly not designed for creatures with wings, especially not ones as large as hers. Muttering a curse, she bent to retrieve the book and shifted back to her human form. She might not find the shape as comfortable as her own, but it was safer for the moment. It wouldn’t do to destroy the very place where she had been invited to stay.

  She stood, book in hand, and found herself facing a doorway that had opened to reveal the very object of her thoughts. Drum stood frozen, one hand on the doorknob and the other braced against the wooden frame. His dark, wavy hair was rumpled as if he’d run his fingers repeatedly through the short-clipped curls, and stubble shadowed the firm line of his jaw. His blue eyes had locked on her, but she couldn’t quite define the expression in them.

  Her fingers clutched the book before her, and she felt a strange and unfamiliar urge to shift her weight from foot to foot. She stomped it under a mental boot heel and straightened her shoulders.

  Ash waited for him to speak, but he remained quiet. The silence stretched between them, tightening in tiny increments like notches on a belt. She could feel the tension, could almost touch it, but Drum gave no indication that he sensed anything out of place, while it poked at her like a pebble in her shoe. Annoying human.

  If he could think of nothing to say to her, then she certainly felt no obligation to initiate a conversation. They didn’t need to utter a word to each other.

  Pulling her gaze away, she half turned to set the book back on the edge of the shelf, then stepped toward the hall that would take her back to her borrowed bed. She had barely moved when Drum cracked the tension with a rough clearing of his throat.

  “I thought you would be asleep,” he said.

  Ash faced him again and realized in a rush that she had no idea what to do with her hands. She looked down at them, wondering how a part of her own body could suddenly feel so awkward and alien. Was it because of their human shape? She told herself it was, because she had no wish to contemplate an alternate explanation.

  Shoving the treacherous appendages into the pockets of her trousers, she lifted one shoulder toward her ear and let it fall. “I have not been awake long enough to require sleep.”

  Drum nodded and stepped the rest of the way into the apartment, closing the door behind him with a quiet click. “I—I, er, I was just downstairs. Clearing up. Our glasses and all.”

  Ash nodded. It seemed the thing to do, even if she wasn’t
certain why he had explained himself. This was his pub, his flat. Her understanding of human laws indicated he could do almost anything he liked here. It would be none of her business.

  He took another step, and Ash noticed just the slightest waver as his foot landed on the edge of the rug. She narrowed her eyes and peered at him more closely. Had he been injured by the hhissih without her noticing? Or could he have taken ill? He had shown no signs of sickness earlier.

  “I also had another little drink. Or two.” He frowned, and the bridge of his nose drew up in a series of small wrinkles. “Or five. I may have been the slightest bit angry with you, Miss Call-Me-Ash. What sort of name is that, anyway?”

  Ash recoiled in surprise. “Angry? You have no cause to feel anger at me, human. I am not the source of your troubles.”

  He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “That’s something you find at the bottom of your fire grate. Not a proper name for a woman at all. Your parents should be ashamed of themselves.”

  He took another couple of steps toward her, not precisely swaying, but perhaps a little less than steadily upright. A small voice in her head whispered she should retreat. Such advice made no sense, went against everything she was, so Ash ignored it. Or rather, she raised her chin and took a step forward, meeting that slightly unfocused blue gaze head-on.

  “I have no parents. I was summoned, not born. And my name is none of your concern.”

  “’Course it is. I’m th’ one usin’ it. You’re not callin’ yourself by your name. That’d just be mental.”

  He leaned forward, and Ash reared back, raising a hand to brace against his chest. She could feel the heat of him through the soft cotton shirt. It warmed her cool fingertips and made her hesitate when she should have pushed him back.

  Drum closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. She saw the way his nostrils flared and heard a low, satisfied hum pass between his lips.