Tethered

by Meljean Brook

  They wouldn’t always be so fortunate. But Yasmeen wouldn’t question her luck today. Not after losing Archimedes, then holding him again.

  By the time she reached the mooring station, Vashon had already loosened the tether holding her lady’s belly against the ground. The furnaces had been fired. Steam billowed from her vents in thick clouds.

  Archimedes steadied the rope ladder for her. “Ready to go, then?”

  No. They weren’t quite done. She looked to Longcock. “We can carry forty passengers. Choose them according to the length of their stay here. Don’t separate any families—if the person who has been here longest has forty children, they all come. We’ll be sending more ships for those who are left behind.”

  “And Mr. Bilson, ma’am?”

  That was up to Archimedes. She met his eyes, raised her brows.

  He shrugged. “Don’t separate any families, as she said. Leave Bilson here with his brother. And we’ll let the other airships know that he was the very last person to arrive, so he should also be the last to leave.”

  Yasmeen grinned. That suited her as well—and now she wanted to be off this damned floating city.

  Climbing quickly, she reached her lady’s deck. Her heart swelled the moment her boots touched the boards. Only a year ago, she’d lost everything. Now she had a beautiful ship, a fine crew, and the most incredible man to share it with.

  Yasmeen turned to him as he came over the gunwale. Now was not the time to kiss or to touch. Taking a cigarillo from her silver case, she lit one and passed it to him.

  She let her fingers brush his, and loved the burn in his eyes. Together, they looked over the city. It was beautiful. Purples and reds and so much green. The gardens lush and fragrant, perfuming the air through the smoke.

  “Bushke named it properly,” Archimedes said softly.

  “Yes.” A paradise. “But it won’t last.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. Whatever else Bushke had been, he wasn’t a fool. His ruthlessness had kept New Eden safe. “It won’t be long. Pirates will discover that they don’t have to fear seeing this city on the horizon. It will soon be prey.”

  “Perhaps for a while,” Archimedes said. “New Eden’s reputation will have to change, but that doesn’t mean it will be known as weak. If the people who remain here love it, they will have reason to defend this city just as fiercely.”

  Yasmeen narrowed her eyes at him. But she could hardly argue with that, could she?

  A commotion below drew her gaze. Bilson. Apparently unhappy with Archimedes’ decision. Ah, but his desperation made the whole world brighter.

  Perhaps not for everyone, though. This city had many vulnerabilities, as did the people who lived here. Someone like Bilson could easily take advantage of them. “Are we leaving another Bushke here?”

  “Bilson?” Archimedes shook his head. “Not with his brother here. Joseph shut him down. I’ve never seen anyone else do that. So this might be the safest place for him.”

  “And he could not be any farther away from your sister.”

  Though Archimedes nodded, she saw the worry in his gaze. Yasmeen knew what it stemmed from. She felt the same.

  “We exposed her when we put out those adverts. Now everyone knows that you have a sister…and that we will pay a fortune for her return.”

  Archimedes’ jaw hardened. His only response was a nod—which meant he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  On-duty and in the sight of the crew be damned. Yasmeen took his hand.

  “Zenobia’s clever,” she reassured him. “And she’s practical.”

  “Yes.” But he did not sound persuaded.

  “She is so practical, in fact, that she will probably begin arranging her own kidnappings, and splitting the ransom we pay with her associates.”

  And there was his beautiful grin. “Do not give her that idea.”

  “I should, though. It would likely end up in her next Lady Lynx adventure.” Yasmeen took the cigarillo from him, was thoughtful as she inhaled. “The solution, of course, is not to pay the next one who kidnaps her. We’ll just kill him.”

  “Or teach her to do it. Then she will have a reputation of her own.”

  Oh, and that was why she loved this man. That was the perfect solution. “We should begin her lessons upon our return—and start by kidnapping an earl, to show her how a proper abduction is done.”

  “And soon she will be off on her own adventures. Zenobia Fox, the Practical Pirate.”

  Yasmeen laughed. “Every crew upon the seas will tremble with fear.”

  As they once had when faced with New Eden. Yasmeen looked to the gangway, where Vashon stood, overseeing the first of the passengers as they climbed aboard.

  “Mademoiselle Vashon!”

  The quartermaster immediately faced her, back straight and expression blank.

  “The probation period of your contract has almost ended, mademoiselle, and you have seen the sort of ship that my lady is,” Yasmeen said. “Will you be staying on?”

  Somehow, the other woman’s shoulders became even straighter. “Will you have me, ma’am?”

  “I will.”

  Vashon gave a sharp nod. “Then you will find it difficult to get rid of me.”

  “We will see. Carry on.” When the other woman turned, Yasmeen glanced to Archimedes and said quietly, “All of the best ones are difficult to get rid of.”

  His gaze fell to her lips. “You will find it impossible to get rid of me.”

  Yasmeen would never want to. But she would be happy to test his claim.

  “Come, Mr. Fox. A mountain of work awaits us at our desk. And I swear that I will tie you to your chair until it is finished.”

  “Tie me?” With a low groan, he closed his eyes. “You tell me this here? Good God, Yasmeen. You will kill me.”

  That would be impossible. Nothing would kill Archimedes Fox. But a little torture never hurt anyone. Yasmeen started toward her cabin—and was pleased when Archimedes didn’t follow her. Instead, he walked by her side.

  Right where he’d always be.

  * * *

  Brighton, England

  December 3

  Miss Zenobia Fox,

  I have reconsidered my position regarding Lady Lynx and her heart of steel. Perhaps a love interest would not be unacceptable—particularly if you put himin danger, and let the villainous bastards reap the consequences.

  The first story will open with a call for help from a duplicitous bastard. In the end, Lady Lynx and her suitor will have so many passengers desperate to escape a floating city, that there simply isn’t room for the bastard on the return trip. But they’ll promise to send a rescue…eventually.

  Yours,

  Yasmeen Fox

  P.S. You ought to call it Lady Lynx and Her Fifty Percent Royalties. Then perhaps I’ll finally tell you why I have tufts at the tips of my ears.

  Read more for a special preview of the triumphant conclusion to Meljean Brook’s epic Guardian series

  GUARDIAN DEMON

  Coming from Berkley Sensation in August 2013.

  Detective Andromeda Taylor’s life had ended with a kiss.

  As dying went, a kiss wasn’t the worst way to go out. It sucked that she’d been shot first, though. The lead slugs ripping through her chest had hurt like a son of a bitch. But throwing herself in front of bullets aimed at her partner wasn’t a bad way to go, either—and during her career she’d investigated most of the bad ways, had seen all of the pointless ways. Saving Joe at least gave her death some meaning.

  Now Taylor was in Hell, her pistol in hand and a wary eye turned toward the crimson sky. A wasteland stretched around her. Tall, jagged boulders littered the barren sands. As far as she could see, nothing moved. Nothing flew overhead. No sun or moon brightened the endless, bloody bruise of the sky. She didn’t know where the reddish glow that illuminated the realm came from. She didn’t want to know where the rotten stench came from. Something—or a lot of things—had died
down here, and she didn’t want to meet whatever had killed them. Not everything in Hell was dead, including Taylor.

  The bullets should have killed her. But after she’d sacrificed her life, the Guardians’ leader had changed her into one of those angelic warriors. Surrounded by a brilliant white light, Michael had transformed Taylor while cradling her in his powerful arms. His firm mouth had covered hers, tasting her lips, taking her breath.

  And the reason behind this stupid trip to this stinking realm was that damned kiss.

  Michael hadn’t just taken Taylor’s breath with that kiss—he’d stolen her blood and forged a connection between their minds. Then, because Michael was a big damn hero, he’d deliberately broken a bargain with a demon and sacrificed his life to save the world, even though it meant his soul would be trapped in Hell, tortured by Lucifer in the frozen field that surrounded the demon’s tower.

  A big damn hero—and a big damn bastard. Michael hadn’t warned Taylor that he intended to link their psyches with that kiss, and he hadn’t asked her permission to do it. Three months after her transformation and his sacrifice, she’d woken up with Michael’s dark presence lurking in her head, like a long-distance connection to Hell that she couldn’t break. For more than a year now, Taylor’s brain hadn’t been her own. He’d known her every thought and action. He’d saved her life when she’d been threatened by demons and nosferatu—but to save her, he’d taken over her mind and used her body like a puppet.

  They’d eventually come to an agreement on that—Michael could take over and fight when her life was threatened, but he wouldn’t force Taylor out of her own head if she didn’t want to go.

  Then he had forced her and Taylor was done with him.

  Until then, she’d tolerated his presence in her head because he had saved everyone—and there was some hope that he could be brought back to life. As a Guardian, she possessed a mental storage space that could hold weapons and any other items; Taylor’s hammerspace also preserved Michael’s lifeless body. Without it, he’d stay dead, so she kept his body safe for him—even though carrying it deepened their psychic connection. Taylor had hated that, too, but she’d tolerated him because the world would be safer with Michael in it. As a human, she’d tolerated him for the same reasons. She’d hated that the Guardians butted in on her investigations and turned the legal system upside down, faking evidence and skipping straight over fair trials by handing out executions, but she also understood that police departments didn’t have the resources to capture or imprison nosferatu and demons. So even though she’d disapproved of their methods, Taylor couldn’t deny that the Guardians fought on the side of the humans, and they were all better off for it—and Michael was the most powerful Guardian, the most dedicated. He’d protected humanity from Lucifer and his demons for millennia. Compared to that, complaining about sharing her headspace for a few years seemed like the petty whine of a spoiled brat, and Taylor couldn’t have tolerated herself if she’d become that. So she’d been determined to soldier through and wait for his escape from the frozen field.

  Then he’d broken his promise and betrayed her trust. It didn’t matter that Michael had been protecting her when he’d done it; after he’d forced Taylor to abandon a woman who’d desperately needed her help, she refused to tolerate him anymore. Then, as if in answer to her prayer, a demon’s sacrifice had destroyed the frozen field and Michael had been released from his torture. Now his soul only needed to return to his body, and Taylor would be free.

  According to Khavi, an ancient Guardian who understood magic symbols and spells and how to stick someone’s soul back into his dead body, the process would be as easy as pie.

  Khavi was also crazy and a liar.

  Nothing about this was easy. Lucifer’s torture had shredded Michael’s humanity, ravaging him to the core. Sure, his soul had been released from the frozen field—but he’d emerged in the form of an enormous, fire-spitting dragon.

  A ravenous dragon. He’d chomped his way through a legion of demons surrounding Lucifer’s tower. The Guardians hadn’t been able to catch up to Michael in Hell, but they’d seen the destruction he’d left behind. A city had been flattened, black marble reduced to rubble. Roasted demon corpses littered the red sands, some partially eaten. God knew how many he’d completely devoured.

  Though the Guardians had searched, not one had seen the dragon. Those Guardians who could teleport attempted to use Michael’s psychic scent as an anchor and jump to his location—but they’d only teleported to Taylor’s side. Others had put themselves in danger, flying over demon armies and perilously close to Lucifer’s tower, hoping Michael would come bust their asses for their stupidity. No dice.

  Obviously Michael didn’t want to be found, so he’d have to come to them. And because his mind was still linked to hers, because she could still feel Michael’s dark psyche prowling through her brain like a hungry beast, Taylor was the bait.

  Bait! Fifteen thousand years of combined experience among almost fifty Guardians, and the best plan they had was tossing Taylor into Hell like a worm on a hook.

  “Just walk around,” Khavi had said. “He’ll come to you.”

  Taylor couldn’t imagine how Khavi would know that. The other Guardian had a Gift of foresight and prophecy, but she hadn’t been able to see anything of Michael’s future after he’d been released from the frozen field. And when Taylor had asked how Khavi knew that Michael would come, the other woman had answered,

  “It’s in his nature.”

  After hearing that, Taylor had barely stopped herself from telling Khavi to fuck off. The seer hadn’t predicted that Michael would turn into a dragon. Obviously, she didn’t know his nature as well as she thought.

  Neither did Taylor. She’d known Michael wasn’t a normal Guardian. She’d known that he was the son of the demon Belial and a human woman. She’d known that demons weren’t fertile; to impregnate a human, Michael’s father had first consumed the flesh and blood of a dragon and his body had been transformed by it. She’d known all of that, but who could have guessed that Michael’s soul would become a dragon? Not Taylor, though he’d lived in her brain. Not even Khavi, who was the offspring of another human and demon pairing.

  Now that dragon might be coming after Taylor, and none of them knew whether a bit of Michael still existed in that form, or if he was like the dragons in the Chaos realm: hungry, destructive, and almost unstoppable. They were all hoping that Michael was still himself, because he’d always protected Taylor. But the truth was…he might just eat her.

  God. What had she done to deserve this? She’d been a good daughter, a good cop. She’d never betrayed a friend. She’d never cheated on a lover. She’d never deliberately hurt anyone—well, aside from the criminals she’d had to throw down, but they didn’t count.

  Life wasn’t fair. Taylor knew that. All too often, decent people were hurt and the bad ones got away with it. Tweakers killed good cops and then had their charges reduced after ratting out their dealers. Mothers worked their fingers to their bones, then handed over their salaries to pay someone else to care for their comatose sons. There were millions of people who deserved better and got worse, and that was just the way the world worked. But if some almighty being was up there giving out superpowers to Guardians and transforming angels into demons, Taylor thought life should be fair. People should get what they deserved.

  Taylor didn’t deserve to be eaten by a dragon. But that was exactly how this fishing expedition might end.

  And that would be a really stupid way to go out.

  If she did become dragon chow, though, it would be her own fault. She could have refused to act as bait. She could have told Khavi to fuck off. The other Guardians would have respected her decision. But the world needed Michael back, and Taylor needed to be free of him. If that meant playing the worm, she’d play the worm.

  So here she was, walking through Hell, hoping that he’d come for her. Once he arrived, Khavi had a plan to trick him back into his body—a plan she
hadn’t shared with Taylor because, through her psychic connection with Michael, he would know it, too. Of course, through their connection, he would know they planned something. He might already be a few steps ahead of them.

  Or behind her.

  A faint rasp sounded, like the scuff of a foot over sand. Heart jumping into her throat, Taylor whipped around. She scanned the barren territory, her eyes and weapon moving as one.

  Nothing. Only the jagged boulders, strewn across the wasteland as if a god had crushed a mountain in his fist and tossed the pieces away.

  A god…or Lucifer.

  A shiver ran over her skin. Taylor forced the demon’s name from her mind. Thinking about the lord of Hell probably wouldn’t alert him to her presence in his realm, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Khavi had deliberately brought her to a territory far away from the demon’s throne so that Taylor would escape his notice.

  Yet she must have attracted someone’s attention. Something had made that sound. On Earth, she might have blamed it on a breeze, but no wind blew in Hell. She held her breath, listening over the rapid beat of her own heart. Silence. But she couldn’t trust her ears. A Guardian’s hearing was far superior to a human’s, but her brain hadn’t fully recalibrated since her transformation. When Michael had been a strong presence in her mind, he’d made those mental adjustments for her so that knowing the distance and direction of any noise seemed instinctive. Though he was still in her head, he wasn’t doing that anymore—and that rasp could have been ten feet away or a thousand.

  Hopefully a thousand. And hopefully made by a small creature, like a wyrmrat. As long as they didn’t come in a swarm, Taylor could deal with the scaly rodent beasts. Other things wouldn’t be so easy.

  Whatever was out there, it had probably smelled her. Guardians didn’t have much of a natural odor, but Khavi had carved a symbol into Taylor’s chest with the tip of a flaming spear before bringing her here. Normally, such a shallow injury would have mended by now, but the spear had once stabbed through a dragon’s heart and absorbed that creature’s power, and even a Guardian couldn’t heal quickly from that weapon. The scent of raw, burnt flesh likely wafted through Hell’s stench, calling to the monsters here like the smell of blood to a shark.