Hard Breaker

by Christine Warren

  Or was she imagining things? Could she really be attracted to a creature who wasn’t even human? No matter how well he pretended. Something about it seemed … inappropriate.

  In fact, when she thought about it, even his human form was out of her league. He could have passed for an actor, or a male model, with his perfect, chiseled features and athlete’s body. Take his shirt off and point a camera at him, and he’d look perfectly at home on the set of a blockbuster superhero action movie. She, on the other hand, looked entirely average. Her coloring might be striking, and she had gotten to be in very good shape while working to save Wardens from the Order, but her features were nothing special. Her nose was a shade too big for her face, her mouth a shade too small. It had a nice enough shape, but her lips weren’t plump, and her front teeth overlapped just a bit when she smiled. She also had freckles. Lots of freckles. In an age of airbrushed skin perfection, she stood out like polka-dotted cotton in a sea of peach-toned silk.

  Besides, they each had more important things to worry about than whether or not they found the other attractive. Things like … hm, the end of the world, maybe?

  Ivy cleared her throat and tried to focus back on the conversation. “Right. Your Warden. I’m still not sure I believe that. It doesn’t make any sense. Not only don’t I have any training at serving a Guardian, I don’t have any training at all. I have no official association with the Guild whatsoever. Never inducted, never tested, never met anyone who was a member, outside of Jamie and Uncle George. Not until all this started happening. I don’t see how it’s possible that I could be a Warden and somehow just get overlooked for twenty-six years.”

  “The Guardians have never concerned ourselves with the inner workings of the Guild,” Baen dismissed. “I cannot say why they would not have brought you into the fold, but it is clear that you were meant to be there. You have magic, much stronger magic than the male Warden, not to mention a character better suited for defending against the machinations of the Order than that weakling.”

  That sort of praise could go to a girl’s head if she let it, but the reference to her “magic” helped her stay grounded. She didn’t find anything particularly magical in the ability to listen helplessly while terrible things happened to other people. It didn’t do anyone any good, and it only made her feel like a failure. There had been plenty of times during her life when she’d considered it a hell of a long way from a blessing. The ability to cast a spell or even physically manipulate energy, those would have been useful. Maybe with a talent like that, she could have actually helped someone. That would have counted as magic.

  “I don’t have any magic,” she said, her tone dismissive to match her feelings. “You’re seeing something that isn’t there.”

  “I do not think so. Do you not possess abilities that other humans do not?”

  “That’s not magic. Some people have certain psychic talents in this world. It makes us freaks, but it doesn’t make us Wardens.”

  “Your answer is yes, then,” he said, looking smug. “You do have abilities.”

  “Ability,” she corrected. She still felt loath to admit it, especially when he seemed to view it as something positive. “And not a very useful one at that.”

  “What is it?”

  Ivy grimaced. He would have to make her get into specifics. “I hear things sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly. “Things that are happening in other places. I don’t see them, or anything. They aren’t like visions. There’s no vision involved at all, and I only hear them while they’re happening. Simultaneously. I don’t get to listen in ahead of time and warn anybody, because they’re not predictions. They don’t do anyone any good at all. Least of all me.”

  “And you do not consider this magical?”

  “How is it magic to know when someone is frightened or furious or heartbroken or in pain and not be able to do anything about it?” The memory of lying in the dark, listening while something tore her uncle and cousin into pieces came flooding back and she had to swallow hard against both the grief and the sickness it inspired. Sometimes she believed she would still be hearing those noises when she was a little old lady in a rocking chair. They hadn’t strayed far from her mind since the moment she first heard them.

  “How is it not?” Baen asked. “You seem to have a mistaken impression as to what magic is. Perhaps this comes from your lack of training from the Guild. In any event, magic is merely the deliberate use of energy to accomplish things that may or may not be accomplished otherwise.”

  “Yeah, and like I said, my ability has never accomplished doodly-squat.”

  “Do not be obtuse. Hearing those events is the accomplishment. That is how your mind has been manipulating energy for years now. The fact that it has been doing so with no conscious effort on your part merely speaks to your innate power. Of course you have been unable to make use of your abilities; you have never been instructed in how to do so. But clearly the ability to manipulate energy is within you. You just need to learn how to channel your own instincts.”

  Huh?

  Ivy had to look down at her feet to make sure they still had contact with the floor. She felt as if she’d just been bowled over like a ninepin. If the Guardian was right, the entire world was about to tilt on its access. Everything she had ever believed would go up in smoke, because it meant that she might actually have to take him seriously about her potential to become a Warden.

  And that stirred up a bunch more questions, ones it actually hurt her to think about. If Ivy had always been meant to be a Warden, why had the Guild never made contact with her. Why had her own family not told her? Had Uncle George never seen it? That seemed impossible, given he had known her for twenty-five years and Baen had spotted it in less than that number of minutes.

  Or even worse, had her uncle known and deliberately kept the information from her? That thought hit like a fist to the solar plexus; it knocked the wind from her. He had known, her whole family had known, how badly some of her “episodes” affected her. There had been times when the sounds of someone else’s grief or agony had literally knocked her to the floor with empathic backlash, times when she had sobbed her eyes out at her inability to help or even comfort those whose tragedies she overheard. Uncle George had seen at least one event with his own eyes, and he had never told her that a little bit of training might not only make it easier to bear, but might actually give her the power to take action.

  How could he have done that to her?

  Shaking, Ivy pushed out of her chair and began to pace the narrow kitchen floor. “That’s—I don’t—I’m not sure I believe that.” She finally got the words out, but it took some pushing and stuttering and headshaking along the way. “I’m not sure I want to believe that.”

  “Does that matter? Truth is. It exists separately from belief and independent of it.”

  “Yeah, can we not get all deep and philosophical right now? I think I’ve got more than enough on my plate at the moment without having to contemplate the nature of reality.”

  He fell cooperatively silent, but she could still feel his gaze on her as she moved back and forth across the tile. Part of her wondered whether he could see inside her with that burning stare of his, but she dismissed the thought. Not only did it make her stomach do weird flips, but since he hadn’t run away screaming, it seemed unlikely. No one seeing the mess of turmoil and exhaustion under her controlled exterior would have wanted to stick around, let alone think she could be of any use to anyone.

  And right there Ivy realized her fatal mistake—she had allowed herself to think the word “exhaustion,” and like a Pavlovian response, acknowledging the existence of the weight of her own tiredness brought it crashing down on top of her head. How long had it been since she had gotten some sleep? Not last night, not with planning this evening’s adventure down to the last cocked-up detail.

  What time was it, anyway?

  She searched the room until she spotted the display on the microwave oven. It was just after midnigh
t. Not horribly late in the grand scheme of things, but to Ivy it felt like the wee hours of the morning. She rubbed her eyes and tried to focus. What had she been saying?

  “Right. Magic, Wardens, talents. Me,” she muttered, mostly to herself. “Let’s just set that aside for the moment and focus on priorities. What’s priority number one at this moment, given the circumstances we’re in?”

  Baen replied as if she had directed the question to him. “We must locate the rest of my brethren. If any of the Seven already move among the mortals of this realm as you believe, then all of us may be required to ensure we can banish them once more.”

  “And now we’re just repeating the same conversation,” she snapped. “I already told you, if any other Guardian is awake, I haven’t heard of it, and neither has anyone I know. So what do you suggest we do to find them? Start knocking on doors? I’ll take the house on the left, you try the one on the right?”

  “Once again you use sarcasm to express a negative reaction. I must assume this is the case, because such an action would be futile and waste precious time.”

  Ivy stopped pacing and faced him, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him through eyes she had to imagine were narrow and bloodshot by now. “You have a better suggestion, then? Brilliant. Let’s hear it.”

  This time he ignored the sting of sarcasm in her voice and simply answered her challenge. “First, you must alert the Guild’s survivors of my presence. This will give them renewed faith in our presence and inspire their continued search.”

  “Yeah, obviously the Guild needs to know,” she grumbled. “I wasn’t planning to keep you a secret from them. But that still doesn’t get us any closer to the other Guardians.”

  “Second,” Baen continued, as if she had not interrupted, “you must indicate my presence in London in a public forum. Guardians monitor such things whenever we are able so that we can connect to face threats requiring greater strength than a single one of us can muster.”

  Announce it in a public forum? What did he expect her to do? she wondered. Produce a television commercial? Stand in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and hand out flyers? “Sorry, but we’re all out of town criers at the moment. Do you think smoke signals would work in a pinch? And yes, I’m being sarcastic,” she snapped as soon as she saw his mouth open. “Sue me. It’s how I react to stress.”

  “I can see that,” he said, his deep voice even but somehow tinged with amusement. At her expense, of course. “But I did not intend to suggest such primitive methods. We must reach the greatest possible audience in the smallest possible time. The situation is urgent. You must use your electronic machines to speak with people all over the world in the same instant.”

  She blinked, her brows furrowing as she tried to translate his archaic speech to modern technology. “Electronic machines? You mean computers? You want me to spread you all over the Internet?”

  “Yes, the Internet. Forgive me. While I may know the concepts, sometime it takes longer to process the language of what I receive when it comes to new knowledge.”

  “What are you talking about? What knowledge that you receive? And if you’ve been asleep for a few hundred years, what do you know about computers and the Internet?”

  “I know of their existence,” he said firmly. “A Guardian’s slumber is not like that of a human. We retain a certain awareness even as we sleep. In addition, we share our knowledge among ourselves. When one Guardian learns of a significant change in the world, he adds it to the understanding of all of us. It is a trick we use to compensate for the passage of time between our wakings.”

  Okay, that sounded pretty cool. Ivy imagined it would go a long way to coping with the twenty-first century after falling asleep in the seventeenth if you could just download a summary of everything that had changed in that time from a sort of hive mind.

  Not that she was comparing the Guardians to bees, mind you. Or, you know, the Borg.

  Then the true implications of his revelation hit her. “Wait. But computers have only been in everyday use for the last thirty or forty years, and the Internet for, like, twenty. So that would mean a Guardian would have to have been awake during that time for you to know about all that. Right?”

  Baen nodded. “Exactly. Therefore, at least one of my brethren is out there now, waiting to be found. Someone will be aware of it and will be attempting to make contact just as I am. We merely need to achieve an intersection of those attempts.”

  “Still easier said than done,” Ivy warned, but at least she could see the possibility now. “I guess it’s worth a try, though. Come on.”

  Chapter Seven

  She turned to stride out of the kitchen, the scrape of chair legs across tile telling her the Guardian had obeyed her summons (no pun intended). He followed her down the short hall to the town house’s front room where a desk in the corner supported a small desktop computer. Ivy settled herself into the chair in front of it and booted up the system. When she glanced over at Baen, she found him examining the surroundings with a slight frown.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked back at her. “You said that the human who lived here was a Warden, but that he is among those who were killed by the Order?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “I did not think that a dwelling of this sort would remain untouched after its owner’s death. Should someone else not be living here now? Do we not run the risk of discovery by remaining here?”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, that’s why I chose this place,” she said, only half paying attention to the questions. She was relieved to see Adam Harris had not bothered to put a password on his desktop. “Normally, you’d be right, but this guy’s disappearance was one of the first things I looked into when I got to England and got involved in the missing Wardens. Harris—the owner of this place—had no next of kin and he was a bit of a recluse. He worked from home, paid all of his bills by electronic transfer from his bank, and he was only in his late thirties. I guess he hadn’t seen the need to write a will yet, so no one was set up to inherit the house. As long as the money in his accounts holds out, no one is going to turn off the power or come looking into buying the building.”

  She pulled up an Internet search engine and directed it to her online mail server, the one she used for her work with the Warden relocation network. “We won’t be staying past morning, so for now, we’re fine.”

  If by fine, she meant exhausted, strung out, and running on pure adrenaline, which at the moment she was. But they were at least safe from immediate discovery. Baen merely grunted, which she decided to take for an indication that he trusted her.

  Hey, it had been a long day. She was ready to take what she could get.

  Her fingers stumbled a little over the keyboard as she first sent a message to Paris. She’d already sent Paul a brief coded text message (little more than one word) to let him know Martin wouldn’t arrive. Later, she’d get him a more detailed summary of what had happened. But for now, she wanted to go straight to the person who had the most immediate contact with the Wardens’ safe house—the contact she knew as Asile, the French word for “asylum.”

  The delete key got a hefty workout, but after a couple of minutes, she had drafted a carefully worded, deliberately obscure message that should alert Asile that a Guardian had surfaced in London and wanted to join up against the Darkness. That would take care of getting word out to the assembled Wardens in Paris. Now the question was where to make a similar announcement on the Net that would attract the attention of the right parties (namely, other awoken Guardians) without bringing the collective might of the Order down on their heads.

  No pressure or anything.

  “You know, it would be a heck of a lot easier to make this brilliant idea of yours work if I knew more about computers,” she grumbled, scowling at the monitor while she chewed on her thumbnail. “I’m a technical writer, not a hacker. Or a criminal mastermind. I don’t troll the Dark Net looking to score plutonium so I can make my own nukes. I don’t
even know how to get to the Dark Net.”

  Baen had given up prowling about the room and had come to stand behind her chair. Because looming was always the way to make someone more comfortable. “I do not know what you refer to, but I believe there are places in this electronic world where humans post advertisements for others they wish to meet or for things they wish to acquire. Are there not?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You want me to set up a profile for you on LuvMatch dot com? I’m not sure you’re going to wind up with exactly the sort of response you’re looking for with that tactic.”

  Her fingers froze over the keys and her eyes narrowed as his words really sank in. “Oh, holy crap,” she muttered to herself as she began typing furiously. “It can’t possibly be that obvious, can it? There’s no way.”

  A Web site popped up on the monitor, blocks of columned text with the occasional bold heading. It was Spartan and inelegant and ridiculously familiar.

  “What is this?” Baen leaned over her shoulder to peer at the screen.

  Ivy snorted out a laugh. “Welcome to Craigslist, Guardian. If you want people all over the world to see what you have to offer, this is the place to show it to them. Shall we see if anyone’s out there waiting to snap you up?”

  She had her head tilted back so she could see his face, a slightly goofy smile born of a mix of exhaustion and elation curving her lips when he looked down. Maybe it was because of seeing his features upside down, or maybe it was a hallucination born from lack of sleep, but for a moment, Ivy could have sworn the fire flared back into his gaze as he studied her features. Her smile faded, and she told herself that it was only in her imagination that the flames brightened as he watched her lips move into a more uncertain expression.

  “Absolutely,” he finally rumbled, his voice quiet. Something about the deep, gravelly pitch rattled her, rolling around low in her belly. The sensation bore a vague resemblance to her earlier butterflies, except this one was accompanied by a surge of warmth that raced in the opposite direction from her blushing cheeks.