by Mary Calmes
“Your friend is gorgeous,” Barbara breathed.
“He’s got a really hot boyfriend too,” Joe told his sister.
“How do you know?” I growled.
“Don’t be jealous, baby,” Joe teased, patting his lap.
He had no idea how badly I wanted to lie down so he could pet me.
“Marcus, Leith is gay?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I told Barb before my eyes flicked back to Joe.
“Simon has a voice almost as sexy as yours, Marcus Roth,” my boyfriend teased again.
I really wanted to be alone with my man. I was almost thrumming with need.
“Marot,” Leith called to me, and when I looked up—because he’d used my warder name, names we never called one another—I found myself looking at two men.
I turned and stepped in close to Joe.
“This is—”
“Shane Harris?” Deb said, looking at the man on the left.
“Mrs. Locke,” the man said, his eyes passing over her as he looked for—“Joe!” he cried.
“Shane?” Joe lifted his face.
“Ohmygod,” Shane gasped, crossing the room preternaturally fast, going down on one knee so he was at eye level with Joe. “Holy shit.”
Joe reached up and put his hands on the other man’s face. When he did, he smiled. “Shit, Shane, how long’s it been?”
Apparently Shane Harris was more than content to stare into my boyfriend’s eyes for the rest of his life.
“Joe,” he finally breathed, his thumbs grazing over his cheeks.
“Marcus,” Leith said under his breath dangerously.
I turned and found my friend with narrowed eyes, a clenched jaw, and his hand on the pommel of his sword. He very much wanted to separate Shane Harris’s head from his body. This was my hearth Shane Harris was touching, and that made my friend nervous. And not just for me, more for himself. Warders losing their hearths, for any reason, was cause for panic. To lose your hearth to another, as our fellow warder, Jackson, had, was close to unbearable. But I had more faith than that.
My relationship with Joe was the longest that existed in my clutch—my group of five warders. Ryan and his hearth Julian had not yet made six months, Malic and his hearth Dylan were even newer, Leith and Simon had just hit seven months, and Jackson and Raphael were verging on three. So they all reacted to the very idea of losing their hearths as cause for deliberate, violent action. Joe and I, the old married couple at just shy of six years, were the anomaly, and so instead of reacting, Leith looked to me to guide him. I had to let him see what faith and trust looked like.
“What are you doing here?” Shane asked, absorbing Joe’s face with his eyes, tracing over it with his hands, utterly, completely, entranced.
“I’m here for my grandfather’s eightieth,” he replied, smiling as he leaned back, away from Shane’s touch, done now with the reunion. He tipped his head back, up at me, reaching at the same time. “And my partner Marcus Roth came with me.”
I took hold of the questing hand, squeezing lightly, smiling over Joe’s happy sigh.
Beside me, Leith exhaled as Shane Harris finally looked at me.
“You’re a warder?” he asked as he stood up, his tone, his stance both combative.
“I am.”
“Joe”—he cleared his throat—“is your hearth?”
“For six years now.” I added the five months in that it would take us to reach the milestone without thought.
He was visibly stricken, and no one said a word.
“I never told him what I was.”
Which was his mistake and not mine. I had trusted Joseph Locke after the first night I had him in my bed. What was Shane Harris’s excuse?
“So what the hell is going on here?” Leith asked, uncharacteristically brash for him. Normally, he only raised his voice around people he knew well, but I was guessing that Joe being thrown into the mix—or the question of a hearth—was what was rattling him.
“Hello,” the other man who had come in with Shane said.
I turned to look at him and found myself smiling. He reminded me right away of my friend, Jackson Tybalt, a fellow warder. There was similar brown hair that spilled to his shoulders, familiar brown eyes though Jackson’s were darker, and the smile, warm and inviting, was also like my friend’s.
“I’m Kyle,” he said, moving forward, offering his hand to me. “Kyle Riggs, and it seems that all of us are long on tempers and short on manners since none of us introduced ourselves proper.”
He was right. We had gone directly to anger and assigning blame.
“Like I said.” He smiled as he squeezed my hand. “I’m Kyle. Who’re you?”
I told him my name and introduced Leith, and then Shane also presented himself properly. Once all the handshaking was done and we had all calmed down a little, Leith asked Shane and Kyle what they were doing there.
“We’re here on behalf of our sentinel, William Boyd, to find out what happened today at Mr. Locke’s store,” Kyle told him. “He got a call from the council on a concern from your sentinel, Jael Ezran. Our sentinel would have come himself to address the matter, but he’s in Portland at his daughter’s wedding to, and I quote, ‘the wrong guy’.”
And with that, the tension in the room dissipated, and everyone was talking at once.
Joe got up, put a hand on Shane’s shoulder as he had still not moved, squeezed gently, and then leaned sideways into me. The show of solidarity, without him even thinking about it, made me flush with happiness.
Shane rose slowly and lifted his hands for quiet.
“Last month our sentinel stripped one of our number, Tarin, from our clutch. He had been conspiring with demons.”
“Why?”
“He needed money,” Kyle chimed in. “His hearth, she wants things, and we all knew it was leading down a bad road, but there is nothing you say to a warder about his hearth.”
No, there wasn’t.
“I would do whatever my hearth asked of me as well,” Kyle said.
“Are you married?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes, sir, just as long as you all—six years.”
And in his mind, his marriage and Joe’s and mine were exactly the same. A hearth was a home, and a warder’s home was not to be trifled with. When I saw his eyes flick to Shane, I realized that his fellow warder was making him uncomfortable with the way he was looking at Joe. I wasn’t all that crazy about it either.
“The demons, Arcan and Emir, they said that Breka had paid Tarin so that I shouldn’t have been there in my father-in-law’s store,” I said to both of the warders.
“I have no idea who that is, but just like you all, we don’t chat with demons. We kill them.”
And that was good to hear.
“So where is this Tarin now?”
“We’ll find him; it’s not your concern.”
“Oh, the hell it’s not,” Leith said quickly. “We need to speak to Tarin and find out what he promised these demons, and we definitely need to track down—” He turned to me. “Who?”
“Arcan and Emir.”
“Yeah, them.” Leith returned his attention to Kyle. “And I guess their boss, Breka, and kill them all.”
“Tarin—”
I cut Shane off. “What’s his real name?”
“Tanner. Tanner King.”
“So Tanner,” I said, humanizing the warder so we all understood what it was that we were talking about, “is no longer a part of your clutch, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So basically you have to find him first and protect him, because once the demons find out that they paid him for a service that doesn’t exist, they’re going to hunt him down and kill him.”
“Yeah,” Kyle agreed. “I know where he hangs out. We can go pick him up first.”
“But he’s no longer a warder, and he’s corrupted himself,” Shane reminded us. “He should reap what he’s sown.”
“Meaning what?” Leith asked.
>
“We cannot be expected to—”
“Oh, the hell we can’t,” Leith snapped, his eyes firing even as he turned to Joe’s parents. “I beg your pardon, folks, but—”
“No, no.” Deb smiled at him. “It sounds like you need to say something.”
“I do,” he told her before turning back to Shane. “That’s bullshit! Tell Marcus and me where this guy lives, and we’ll take care of it.”
Both Shane and Kyle looked at him like he’d grown another head.
“What?” he asked sharply.
“We’ll all go,” Kyle soothed my fellow warder. “Shane didn’t mean to imply that we would not take care of our own.” He turned to look at him. “Did you?”
“Shit,” Shane hissed, defeated.
I put a hand on Leith’s shoulder. “We need Ryan.”
He nodded and dug into the pocket of his jeans for his phone.
“You don’t need another warder here,” Shane told me. “There are all four of us here. We can handle a—”
“You’re down a warder because there’s no way you replaced one that fast. Am I right?”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Okay, so, because I want to see Tanner and the demons he’s trafficking with, Leith has to go with me. No warder ever goes anywhere alone, and I’m sure as hell not counting on one of you guys to watch my back.”
“Absolutely not,” Leith agreed from beside me.
“So since both Leith and I need to go with you, and because this house can’t be sealed, I need another warder I trust to come and guard my family and my hearth.”
No one said a word because, really, what argument could they offer me? I needed my own backup, and I needed a guard for the most important person in my life.
“Any questions?”
There were none.
The two warders were on their phones while Leith and I sat in the living room with Joe’s family and answered the million questions that were volleyed at us.
Demons were real?
Yes, very.
We killed them?
Yes, we did.
Was it a full-time job?
Definitely not.
Did we get paid?
Never.
How long were you a warder?
Until your body wouldn’t let you be one anymore.
Did a lot of warders get killed?
All the time.
At which point Deb moved from where she was next to Elliot and came and sat down beside me and held my hand.
It was very telling.
Elliot explained how the first demon had come and shown him eyes full of blood and clawed him and basically scared the crap out of him.
“I had no idea what to do. I was afraid everyone would think I was nuts.”
“In San Francisco,” I said, “my friend Malic works with the police. My friend Ryan has a local television show he hosts, and he makes a point of visiting all kinds of businesses, and those include those that are owned by Wiccans, psychics, Gypsies, and the people that others go to for help with occurrences that would seem paranormal in nature. Our sentinel checks the paper, follows anything odd or out of the ordinary, and sends us to check things out.”
“Plus,” Leith told them, “we patrol, every night, two to three of us.”
“We don’t do any of that,” Shane said, having entered the room at the tail end of the conversation, walking around the couch and taking a seat beside Joe.
“You don’t patrol?” Leith asked.
Shane shook his head.
“Well, I for one think it’s dangerous not to be visible to the pit creatures.” Leith shrugged, gesturing at Joe’s father. “Case in point.”
The doorbell rang then, and Kyle asked Elliot and Deb’s permission to go get it. When he returned, he had two other men with him. Here were the rest of William Boyd’s warders.
They seemed like nice guys, pleasant, but as I looked at them, even at Shane and Kyle, I was struck by how different they seemed from the guys I normally hung out with dispatching demons back to hell. In comparison, they were lacking.
“So we have news,” Daniel, one of the newly arrived warders, began. “I guess this demon, Breka, already found out about Tanner and grabbed him out in front of his house earlier today. I talked to his hearth, and she said that he was taken right outside of their home.”
“Too bad he didn’t make it inside.”
Leith turned to me. “So even if you’re not a warder anymore you still have all the power?”
“I think your sentinel can strip you of the title,” I said, “but the strength is there until you die.” I looked over at Shane. “Although I’ve never heard of a warder being stripped and then not returned to the labarum council. I thought warders were placed in prison until they died if they were guilty of corruption.” I squinted at him.
He stared at me.
I waited.
“Shit.”
“Shane?” Kyle prodded.
“Okay, so, the guy the demons took, that’s a doppelganger. It’s not really Tanner.”
The other two warders turned in stunned silence to look at him.
“William said that only I could know,” Shane told the other three warders who belonged to his clutch. “We had to try and draw the demons out. We had to know who they were.”
“That’s horrible,” Joe said suddenly, his voice full of revulsion, and we all turned to look at him. “All this time you guys have been letting that woman think that her warder is still sleeping in her bed, and now that he’s taken, you’re just gonna let her believe that right there in front of her was the last time she’ll ever lay eyes on him.” A hard shiver passed through him. “That’s vile.”
And it was. The warder’s hearth thought he was dead, and he had to deal with knowing that she thought that, and she had to deal with that being her reality. I couldn’t think of a more horrible price to pay.
“You need to tell her the truth and let her see him.” Joe’s voice splintered. “That’s obscene.”
“It is,” Kyle agreed—his eyes, his face, everything about him having gone cold. “You let some… thing… sleep with the man’s hearth.” He took a breath. “I can’t believe William would condone such a thing.”
I wondered about them then, about their clutch. Jael kept no secrets from us, and we had none from each other.
“We’re so lucky,” I said under my breath.
“Yes, we are,” Leith agreed, his voice low.
“Do we know where this demon, this Breka, lives?”
“Yes,” Daniel said, turning from Shane with some effort, his brows still furrowed, his jaw still tight. He had, it seemed, the same reaction that Kyle had. “But his house is over a dimensional door. It’s not actually a house; it’s just an entrance to another plane.”
I frowned. “Do you guys not have experience with crossing dimensions?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, Leith and I can go alone, then. It’s not a problem.”
“But the problem is that Breka only allows people entrance to his home if they bring him a sacrifice.”
“I’m sorry?” I was aghast that they would allow something like that to happen in their territory. “What kind of warders are––”
“No, not a sacrifice like that.” Daniel shook his head. “Not one for slaughter or blood, but like a beautiful man or woman who he can sleep with if he wants.”
“Sleep with?” He had said sleep and not defile or rape, but I was still confused.
“Not hurt in any way,” Leith clarified.
“No, just screw,” Daniel clarified.
“Wait, people bring him dates?” I still wasn’t sure I understood.
“Sort of, I guess. Like when you take a hot girl with you to a club, you know you’re gonna get in because the doorman’s gonna wave you to the front of the line.”
“But you don’t normally leave the hot girl with the club owner.”
“Yeah, but I bet that goes on.�
�
I cleared my throat. “So the sacrifice is what––drugged or something, and this Breka, he sleeps with them?”
