Guardian

by Sam Cheever

  When I opened them again she was standing in front of me. I screamed as she reached her thick black claws toward me and wrapped them around my throat, squeezing slowly so she could enjoy watching the light fade from my eyes.

  I looked into her black gaze as she squeezed the life from my body and saw pleasure there and not much else.

  My lips opened as I struggled to breathe and my body went limp. She pulled me off my feet and up hard against her huge body. On some level I recoiled from the stench, but my imminent death took precedence over the list of things to focus on at that moment.

  She shuddered against me as my heart fluttered, enjoying my death in an almost erotic way. My gaze never left hers.

  She never saw it coming.

  Just before I blacked totally out, I lifted the long knife and, with a single, last ditch swipe, severed her nasty head from her nasty body.

  She fell backwards, releasing me, and I dropped to the floor. Behind me the sounds of battle continued. I knew I should go help Ian. But I just needed a few seconds to recover my equilibrium. My throat felt as if it had been crushed. I closed my eyes and brought healing energy to the spot. After a moment I could breathe again.

  I stood wearily and turned toward Ian, just in time to see him dispatch the harpy with his sword.

  His pretty brown face was speckled with ugly black splotches and his chest had long, slimy black smears of harpy blood on it. He swiped the sword over the harpy’s beautiful purple wing to clear most of the blood from it and dropped it back into its scabbard. A faery scabbard, I noticed, made of highly burnished gold with silver accents. It bore Tana’s royal seal.

  I lifted an eyebrow but, before I could ask, Ian turned away, toward the back of the cave. “You ready?” He didn’t wait for my response.

  We entered a large cavern that was so dark I couldn’t even see Ian a few inches in front of me. I reached out and felt for him. When my fingers touched smooth, warm skin I slid them down until they encountered the rough waist of his faery breeches. I tucked my fingers inside so I wouldn’t lose him.

  “This really isn’t the place or time, Monad,” he murmured huskily, “but I’m game if you are.”

  “Shut up.”

  The air in the cavern was thick with the putrid harpy stench. I slammed my lips shut in regret as soon as I’d spoken. I could almost feel the smell as a coating on my tongue. My gag reflex kicked in but I fought it back.

  It’s just odor. I told myself. It can’t really be crawling into my nose, my lips, my eyes. But it was so heavy in the air it felt as if it were alive. I wanted to ask Ian about it, but I was reluctant to open my mouth again.

  Ian’s body jerked to a stop suddenly and I slammed into him. It wasn’t an altogether horrible experience.

  He cursed softly and began fumbling in his breeches for something. Finally a soft click preceded a small illumination on the ground in front of us. We looked down and saw a huge skull on the ground at our feet. The fangs jutting out from the skull were easily six inches long and curved together at the sides of a wide jaw. It looked like it had been a gargoyle.

  Ian stepped over the thing and kept the small, beamstick focused on the ground as we walked. It was a good thing he’d pulled it out. The ground in the cavern was a veritable minefield of bones and rotting parts.

  Well, at least that explained the stench.

  Finally, I couldn’t help myself. I had to talk. “Did you come in this way?”

  Ian’s body swayed as he shook his head. “I came in at the other end of the wood. But this is closer to Tana’s kingdom. I’m getting short on time and decided it was worth the risk.”

  I frowned. “Short on time? For what?”

  He stopped suddenly. “Did you hear that?”

  I listened, casting my eyes blindly around as I strained to hear what he thought he’d heard.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  After a few beats he started walking again. I followed in silence for a while and then commented. “This seems like a lot of carnage for two harpies doesn’t it?”

  He stiffened and stopped again.

  That time I heard it too. It was a small shifting sound. Like claws against rock. A tiny breeze swept over us, thick with the stench of harpy. And a whisper of sound followed it.

  Wings.

  Ian lifted the tiny beam of light toward the ceiling of the cavern and, at first, I thought the ceiling was alive. It appeared to be filled with roiling purple shadows that shifted smoothly against the light of Ian’s beamstick. But then the small circle of light halted on something that was definitely a face.

  Or at least it was the eyes of a face, but its bottom half appeared to be all jagged, deadly looking teeth.

  A soft warbling sound filled the air and the ceiling roiled in a wavelike fashion as what looked like thousands of harpies shifted into movement. Then one of them detached herself from the rock and hung above us, her nearly black wings stretching to their full width and her talons curving in anticipation. She looked huge, at least fifteen feet long. She threw back her head and screeched.

  The place exploded into sound.

  Ian and I covered our ears and fell to our knees into the carnage beneath us. Beyond the terrible sound of their screeching, I could just barely hear the thunderous drone of thousands of enormous wings beating the air above us.

  I fell to my back, blown over by the force of the wind they were creating in the confined space. Ian barely managed to stay upright, but he had to fight to regain his feet. I pushed myself into a crouch, but found it difficult to stand under the pounding wall of air.

  Dragging the long knife from my waistband where I’d stuffed it only moments earlier, I said a silent prayer and forced my legs to straighten. I’d faced death many times, both as a human and then later, as a warrior spirit. But never had my mortality been so close.

  Ian and I were dead. We were just a few breaths away from being a little more carnage on the horrible goriness of that cavern floor. And no one would ever know where we’d gone or what had happened to us.

  We assumed our back-to-back stance and prepared to die.

  The ceiling slowly lowered toward us like a black, swirling cloud. It had become eerily silent in the cavern and I realized my ears had finally given out. I was deaf.

  Like a bad, silent horror movie I watched the harpies descend on us in a solid wall of death. Layered one upon another over our heads as they pounded their huge wings in slow shallow beats to keep from interfering with each other as they dropped. Their enormous, clawed feet were curved in anticipation of ripping us to shreds, their jaws spread wide in silent screams.

  I felt Ian’s hand at my hip and reached for it. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard, twice. I was sure it was meant as encouragement. Just two warriors set to beat the odds again. But I accepted it for what it really was. A silent goodbye. I squeezed back, hard, and released the hand reluctantly, pulling my weapon from its sheath at my waist and bending my knees in a battle crouch.

  The air thickened as they dropped toward us, the stench condensing until it was almost solid. But then they hit us. And I forgot all about the smell.

  Claws ripped my flesh. Teeth tore at me. In a mindless blur, I swung the knife and stabbed at the horribly human-like bodies with my fork. Ian’s back was pressed firmly to mine and I felt every swing of his sword, every jerk of pain as another piece of his body was ripped, another limb wrenched.

  I connected more often than not. And we were definitely doing some damage. Several huge bodies already littered the ground around us, forming a bumpy pile of dead stinkiness as we fought on through the endless wave of them riding the air above our heads. But I knew that the supply of harpies would long outlive our ability to kill them.

  They just kept coming.

  The long knife was slick now with my blood and I could barely hold onto it. I longed to wipe my blood coated fingers on my shirt, but I didn’t dare take even the two seconds of time to do it.

  Ian and I turn
ed in a slow, constant circle as we slashed and stabbed with our weapons, kicking our legs desperately into soft, unprotected bellies. We were like a slowly spinning porcupine, more deadly because we were hugging death ourselves.

  I slashed at the wing of one harpies as another descended on me. I stabbed my fork into the second harpy just as a third swept in and grabbed my already torn shoulder with her razor-like teeth.

  Pain sluiced through me as she wrenched my shoulder hard, making me drop my fork as the arm went numb. In desperation I kicked out and connected hard across her middle. Her teeth released me as she sailed away, but my arm hung useless against my side.

  I swung the long knife across the first harpy’s throat and black blood sprayed me as she went down. We had so many dead harpies around us at that point that I was using them as a protective wall against the unending wave of monsters still attacking us from above.

  I felt Ian jerk against my back and he suddenly dropped away from me, falling to his knees on the ground. I turned and slashed the throat of the harpy that rode him down, severing her nasty head completely in my enthusiasm.

  Ian climbed slowly to his feet but it was too late.

  That single second of inattention was enough. We went down under a new layer of monsters.

  Ian’s hand found mine again as we hit the ground. I grasped his hand gratefully and said my final prayers. My body jerked as an endless array of teeth and claws ripped away at it. My knife arm was pinned and I was helpless, unable even to put up a fight as I felt teeth closing over my throat. I knew I was one breath away from final death.

  Ian’s hand grasped mine convulsively and then fell away.

  The teeth on my throat tightened inexorably, closing off my ability to breath and ripping at my flesh. Warm blood trickled down my throat and I was suddenly numb. I felt my soul form lifting away from the worthless husk of my body.

  In my soul form I couldn’t hear, taste, or smell the horror of that roiling cavern.

  I hung above the boiling layer of monsters and watched for Ian’s soul. I figured, in the absence of his guardian I’d escort it to St. Peter myself. But it never came out. I frowned at this but my attention was suddenly caught by a light in the distance. It started out as a small light where the passageway opened up into the cavern and then exploded outward, filling the entire cavern. With the light came warmth and my soul form stretched languorously under the healing heat. I watched as, one by one, the harpies shrieked away from the light and withered under it, shriveling up into writhing, formless masses as if they were being melted down.

  As the outer layer of monsters was destroyed, the awareness of the light began to filter its way through the horde and they suddenly shot upward, like water from a geyser, and opened their horrible mouths in what I knew was probably an earsplitting shriek, then turned as one, giant mass and flew toward the nearest passageways.

  There were way too many of them to fit in the narrow openings and, as they reached the entrance to the passage, the outside rings of harpies crashed against the rock and slid downward, to land in crumpled heaps on the ground. Their bodies immediately succumbed to the melting light and became formless lumps of nothingness on the ground.

  The cavern was now empty except for the bloodied, unmoving bodies on the floor, surrounded by mounds of dead harpies. I turned toward the light, intending to find out what the hell it was, but suddenly my soul form was jerked sideways and down, and I found myself floating, resisting all the way, back into my mangled body.

  Damn! I thought just as I settled back into what was left of my body. This is gonna hurt.

  My first awareness was of heat. The light burned through my lids and I squeezed them tight for fear that I’d be blinded by it if I opened them. But the warmth had a healing quality that dulled my aches and pains to the point where I could even contemplate moving.

  I heard a groan beside me and realized Ian was stirring. Then the light dimmed and I had the sense that someone was standing over me, looking down. I forced my eyelids to open, squinting painfully as I looked up at a startling white form. The scent of wild flowers touched my nose.

  A tiny, smug face hovered above all that white. “Thank God I showed up in time. You’d made your usual mess of things it appears.” To me, the sound of Etta’s voice was worse than the harpies’ ear shattering shrieks had been. I closed my eyes and pushed out a breath, sending out a silent plea. Bring the harpies back, I don’t want to owe Etta my life.

  When I opened my eyes again Etta was still there, looking very pleased with herself.

  Ian groaned again and sat up. I looked at him and he looked terrible. I probably looked worse. We were both covered in blood, ours as well as the harpies’, but miraculously we appeared whole. No rips, no tears, no missing chunks of flesh. Apparently Etta’s healing light had done its magic.

  I sighed and pushed myself to my feet. “Thanks for your help, Etta. I had it under control, but you saved me some time and energy.”

  Etta slanted a dark eyebrow at me. “Un huh.” She turned to Ian. “I’ve been assigned as your guardian. It appears your last guardian was found bound up with faery string and left in a cave in the Wood.”

  Ian pursed his lips and glanced at me. A slight flush crept up his neck. “Imagine that.”

  I rolled my lips to keep from smiling.

  Etta was not amused. “Don’t even think about trying that with me, Lavelle. I’ll have you in front of the Council so fast you’ll need to go back in time to find your ass. I don’t care if you are human.”

  Ian frowned. “How did you escape from Tana’s guards anyway?”

  Etta just shrugged. “They never got me to the caves.”

  Ian looked around the cavern and, because I was watching him carefully, I saw the light of realization come into his pretty brown eyes as he glanced down and lifted one foot to look beneath it. He reached down and picked up his sword. Then he grabbed my hand and tapped the tip of the faery sword on the ground three times. “Later, guardian.” And we were off, traveling silently through time and space.

  When we landed on the street outside his building I still wore a wide smile at the look of shocked surprise I’d last seen on Etta’s monster face.

  She’d been really pissed.

  It was a good day.

  I held my fist out to Ian for rock knuckles and he tapped it with his. Then he looked at me and frowned. “We need to get cleaned up before we go to the meeting.”

  I glanced down at my slime covered clothing and nearly black hands. “You think?”

  He peered toward his building and frowned. “We need to backtrack a bit. Go in another way.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  He shrugged, “My layer is being watched.”

  He threw a small amount of faery dust over our heads and pointed toward his building. Two faeries lurked in the layer between us and it.

  Ian leaned close and spoke in my ear. “My guards.”

  I frowned. “So are we going around them or through them.” Even as I asked I wanted to weep. I was already exhausted from our battle with the harpies.

  “Around them.” He grabbed my hand. “Come on.”

  We backtracked to the next street over, then down a few blocks, and slipped across in the shadows to the side of the street where Ian’s building stood. He took me into an alley and jumped onto a rusty, metal ladder at the side of the building. The jump looked to be about eight feet high but he’d done it effortlessly.

  I frowned. Something about Ian Lavelle just didn’t add up.

  He stood on the bottom rung and reached a hand toward me. I grasped it and he pulled me up easily.

  Unfortunately I ended up in his arms, both of us clinging to the bottom of the creaking ladder.

  Before I knew what he was doing his lips were on mine. My eyes widened in quick shock but then I quickly succumbed to the drug that was Ian. My limbs melted beneath his touch. My body arched into his and a low, drawn out moan emerged from my throat unbidden.

 
; I forgot where we were and let go of the ladder, wrapping my arms around his neck. I deepened the kiss as Ian slid his hands down my back and rubbed my lower back and buttocks in slow circles that made me tingle in all the right places.

  I clasped my hands behind his neck and dragged him closer.

  Something clanged below us and we jerked apart.

  A mangy cat sauntered by, glaring up at us and hissing.

  Ian laughed huskily. “You go up first.”

  I studiously avoided his gaze as I reached for the next rung and quickly climbed the ladder. We jumped from building to building until we reached the roof of his building.

  A moment later he was letting us into his apartment.

  He moved directly to the window overlooking the street, pulling aside the curtain. After a moment he swore softly.

  I joined him at the window, looking over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  “They’re watching me. That’s not good. They must suspect something.”

  I strained to see. There were several people walking and milling around on the street below. Only one person seemed separate and distant from his surroundings. He stood against the brick wall of the coffee shop across the street. His arms were crossed over his chest, one foot rested against the wall, and his ball cap was set low on his face. Something about his posture screamed surveillance. He just seemed too casual slouching there. “Who is he?”

  Ian glanced at me, dropping the curtain. “He’s one of them. And I need to stay away from him until I’m ready.” He turned and headed toward the back of the apartment. “Come on. I’ll get you something to wear. You can shower first.”

  I lifted the curtain and peered around it. The figure across the street raised his head and, for just the tiniest fraction of a second, I could see his eyes beneath the brim of his hat. They appeared to glow red in the refracted light of the street lamp, making me shiver with a sense of foreboding.

  Who the hell were these people that Ian was mixed up with? What did they have to do with Tana and the fairies? And what was Ian’s role in their plans? Why were there fairies waiting in a travel layer outside his house and why was he avoiding them? It was obvious that Tana had sent him on this mission, whatever it was. So why didn’t Ian trust her people?