Hard Breaker

by Christine Warren

  “Like you?” She couldn’t help it. Ivy glanced from the brunette woman in front of her to the hulking male mountain by her side and back again. Several times. She somehow failed to see the resemblance. “Are you trying to tell us that you’re a Guardian?”

  Her incredulous tone might not have been all that polite, but she just couldn’t help it. There was no such thing as a female Guardian.

  Was there?

  “What do you know of Guardians, female?” Baen finally asked, his voice emerging as a low, menacing growl. “Clearly it cannot be much if you do not understand that they are warriors, not nursemaids.”

  “Oh, feck,” Michael hissed, visibly wincing as he took two large steps to the side, until he nearly fell off the steps. He shot Ivy a wry glance. “You might want to back up there a bit. He’s going to be sorry he said that.”

  It didn’t take Ivy long to understand what he meant.

  The woman called Ash didn’t even bother to reply to Baen’s insulting words or his sneering expression. Instead, she simply stepped forward into the shadows of the threshold and reached out with an arm that was suddenly gray and muscular and tipped with lethally sharp claws. She snapped her fingers closed around the Guardian’s throat—the other Guardian’s throat, Ivy suddenly understood—and bared a set of long, intimidating fangs.

  “Would you care to rephrase that, brother?” Ash spit out, her own growl more than a match for Baen’s. “Or should I rip out your throat and let the Guardian who takes your place offer his apology in your stead?”

  Baen remained silent, and Ivy shot frantic glances around the assembly, waiting for someone to do something sensible. When her gaze lit on Michael, he just shrugged as if to indicate he had tried to warn them.

  Wondering where she had left her sanity, Ivy stepped forward, insinuating her much smaller frame between the two snarling Guardians. “Wow, way to get the family reunion off to an exciting start.” She tried to offer Ash a smile, but she had the feeling it looked more like a pained grimace. “I apologize for Baen. He’s been a little grumpy this morning. We had kind of a rough night. Do you think you could let him go now? I mean, yes, that was a lousy thing for him to say, but you kind of took us by surprise. We weren’t even sure anyone would see that Craigslist ad, let alone respond this quickly. Please?” she added when Ash didn’t move. “I think we should all sit down inside and talk. Okay?”

  It took another several heartbeats—admittedly, racing ones—before Ash released her grip and swept past Baen into the front hall. “Fine, but we must talk quickly. It is important that we all begin our journey as soon as possible.”

  “Journey? What journey?” Baen demanded, grudgingly responding to Ivy’s nudge and moving to allow their visitors inside.

  “To Paris,” Michael said. “My sister said that we all need to get to Paris as soon as possible.”

  “Your sister said.”

  Ivy could hear the skepticism and frustration vibrating through Baen’s flat tone and instinctively reached out to lay a hand on his arm. “No offense, but I think we’re going to need a little more information than that before we pack up and take your word for it, Michael.”

  “Drum. Only my mother calls me Michael.”

  “As I said, we must talk quickly.” Ash glared at her partner. “The basic information you require is this. Five of the Guardians have woken before you. The other four are in North America. We have all made contact and have been working together to battle the worst of the threats from the Darkness, but in the past weeks, the situation has escalated to the point that we can no longer be everywhere that our presence is required. Among us, we have been able to confirm the escape of at least five of the Seven into the human realm.”

  Ivy felt the muscle under her hand jump and saw Baen stiffen until he should have been shaking with the tension.

  “Five?” he repeated, sounding incredulous. “By the Light, how has such a thing been allowed to happen?”

  “The Guild has been compromised. The Order launched a covert war against them some time ago, and they have managed to murder more than half of the existing Wardens over the past two to three years.”

  Ivy nodded to Ash. “I already explained about the Guild, about the headquarters being destroyed, and about the survivors going into hiding. Baen is aware of all that.”

  The female Guardian switched her focus to Ivy. “Then you are his Warden.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Baen spoke over her denial, fixing her with a glare.

  She sighed and tried to explain. “I’m not a member of the Guild. Baen seems to think that I must be his Warden. Although I have Wardens in my family—had them,” she clarified, “—I was never recruited. I never took the Guild’s entrance exam, never had any contact from them, and have absolutely no training. I wouldn’t know how to cast a spell if you tattooed it on the back of my hand.”

  “Welcome to the club.” Michael’s dry tone caught her attention and she looked to see him sporting a crooked smile. “You’ll get your membership pin and personalized jacket in your welcome packet by post.”

  “I can’t be a Warden.”

  “You may protest all you like, but I will warn you that it changed nothing for the five new Wardens before you,” Ash told her bluntly. Ivy was beginning to think Ash did everything bluntly. “Each Guardian who has woken in the past months has claimed a Warden with no previous training or connection to the Guild. I believe the human expression would say they had ‘on-the-job training.’”

  Ivy glanced at Baen, then back to their two visitors. Neither of them appeared to be joking about any of this. Hello, brain overload.

  “So, you’re really serious? You really think I’m some kind of latent Warden, even though I’ve been working with surviving Wardens in hiding for the past eight months or more and not one of them has ever said anything to indicate I might be one of them? How is it that more than a dozen Guild members spent all that time with me, and that idea was never even tossed onto the front step, let alone had the cat wander anywhere near it?”

  Ash raised an eyebrow. “How many of those Wardens you worked with were male?”

  “All of them.” Duh. Ivy left the “duh” to be implied. What sort of question was that, anyway? Wardens were always male. She had never even heard of a female Guild member.

  When Ash said nothing more, Ivy started to get irritated. She was about to snap something quite rude when Michael—when Drum—stepped in.

  “You’d get a much longer and more passionate explanation on this subject from Wynn,” he said with another of those crooked smiles. “She’s in America. Chicago, to be precise, with her Guardian, Knox. By now she’s probably formed the International Wardens’ Committee to Combat Gender Discrimination. It’s a bit of a pet subject of hers, and she’d be happy to tell you I’m the only new Warden who turned out to be male, just like Ash is the only Guardian—ever, as it happens—who turned out to be female. All the other new recruits are ladies, just like yourself.”

  “Which means that the Guild will be faced with some very harsh truths about its practice of excluding females, once it re-forms,” Ash said. “But in the meantime, all the previously existing members remain male, and they remain oblivious to the idea that females could possibly number among their kind.”

  “Sexism?” Ivy’s mind reeled and she felt like laughing. “You’re telling me the explanation is good old-fashioned male chauvinism? Seriously?”

  Ash shrugged. “If the pig foot fits…”

  “Then I’m really a Warden? Baen’s Warden?”

  “I informed you thusly.”

  Ivy spun on Baen and stared at him, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Literally. For the first time in her life, she truly got that expression. “You did not just tell me you told me so.”

  Drum almost tripped over himself stepping into the fray. “Ah, my friends, that’s really not the issue of the moment, now is it? The important point to remember is that the Guild as such doesn’t re
ally exist anymore, so we can’t rely on getting assistance from a large force of Wardens against the Order, let alone the Seven. That makes it even more important than ever that we all work together on this, all six of the Guardians who’ve woken, along with their Wardens. If we don’t, we might as well start dabbing vinegar behind our ears so we’re ready when the Demons come to gobble us down like hot chips.”

  “Then your sister has also proven to be a Warden to one of my brothers.” Baen glanced at Ash, frowned, then grudgingly corrected himself. “Siblings.”

  Ash bared her teeth at him. Wow, they really did act just like family.

  “No,” Drum said. “But she has the Sight. Maeve can see events before they happen, and she’s had a vision that says we all need to be in Paris for whatever’s coming at us. If we’re not…” He shook his head. “She wouldn’t even tell me what she saw happening if we’re not there, but when she first came out of the vision she spent twenty minutes bent over the toilet, heaving up her guts. I figure that’s a pretty fair indication we might want to avoid that alternative.”

  “We have already discussed this with the others, and they agree that a major strike by the Order in Paris would be logical,” Ash said. “It is the traditional stronghold of the Guild, and we speculate that any who survived the destruction of the headquarters might not have scattered far from the city. There is also a strong possibility that Wardens who received news of the attack there might have been drawn back in hopes of lending assistance, or even on the slim chance of finding that the news had been false and the Guild still stood.”

  Ivy nodded. “You’re right on both counts. Both those things did happen. Survivors did remain in Paris, and more returned right after the fire. They were the ones who established the network to gather up the Wardens who went into hiding and get them to safety. I’ve been working with them since I got to England.” She briefly related the story of her uncle’s death and how it had drawn her to England and spurred her mission to save any surviving Guild members. “We try to remain anonymous, even to each other, though, so I can’t tell you exactly how to find Asile. I can let him know about you, though, next time I hear from him. I sent a message last night, about Baen, so he should contact me soon.”

  “That’s fantastic news.” Drum glanced at Ash and squeezed her hand. “Better than we had hoped for, in fact. We were starting to fear that we weren’t going to find any surviving members of the Guild. The others have been searching for a while now, with no luck.”

  “They’re kind of a wary bunch at this point,” Ivy said. “We’ve worked out ways to get through to them, but mostly we’ve had to let them come to us. Anyone who’s actively seeking them out is looked at with a lot of suspicion in case they turn out to be nocturni. The Order hasn’t given up on finding and killing all the Wardens they missed in their earlier strikes.”

  “We never believed they had.”

  “Knowing the survivors have gathered in the city makes it that much more important that we make our way to Paris as well,” Ash said. “We will contact the others and confirm that a sixth Guardian has woken and urge them all to make their way to us immediately. If what Maeve has seen is correct—and she is never wrong—our most important battle will be fought in that place. We must gather all of our numbers and prepare ourselves for war against the Darkness.”

  Oh, goodie. Didn’t that sound like fun times?

  “You should return with us to Dublin,” the female Guardian continued. “This dwelling is not warded. It cannot remain safe from the nocturnis for long. Our home is much more secure and several of the others have been there before. They will have no trouble locating us so that we may organize our approach to Paris.”

  “Whoa, hold on a minute.” Ivy threw on the brakes with a palms-out gesture. “Why should we go to Dublin? Last time I checked, that was in the opposite direction from Paris. Besides, I still have stuff to do here. I need to contact Asile, I need to deal with the guy in the kitchen, and most importantly, I need a while to digest what’s going on here. You can’t just pour this stuff down my throat and expect me to swallow it, no problem. I am not nineteen years old, and this is no beer funnel. It’s going to take a little getting used to.”

  “You can think and pack at the same time,” Baen growled at her. “I also dislike plans made by others on my behalf, but if these two are correct, then it is a sensible course of action.”

  “Wait a second,” Drum interrupted. “What guy in the kitchen? What are you talking about?”

  Ivy wished she had a CliffsNotes summary of the past eighteen hours so she could just hand the newcomers a copy and not have to keep filling in the blanks for them. “Martin. He’s the Warden I was trying to get to France last night when demons attacked us and Baen woke up to rescue us. It’s kind of a long story. Can we talk about it later and settle this trip to Dublin thing first?”

  No one answered her, probably because the question hadn’t been directed at Baen, and he was the only one left standing in the hallway after their visitors both spun on their heels and sprinted toward the back of the house. Confused, Ivy sent her Guardian a questioning glance and then hurried after them.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” she called out before she even reached the door to the kitchen. When she pushed it open, she found Drum leaning against the counter and cursing as she gazed out the window. Ash stood on the open threshold of the back entrance with her skin turning stony gray. Fangs already flashed behind lips curled into a snarl.

  Martin was nowhere to be seen.

  “What happened?” Ivy demanded. “Where’s Martin? Did you scare him off? He’s kind of jumpy at the best of times.”

  Ash growled something in a language Ivy didn’t recognize. Presumably a dead one. If it hadn’t been dead before, it might very well have keeled over the second it got a glimpse of the fury on the female Guardian’s face.

  Drum shoved away from the window. He didn’t look much happier than his partner, but at least he didn’t appear ready to disembowel whoever happened to be standing closest to him.

  “You’re seeing what we saw,” he said, shaking his head. “We ran in to find the room empty and the back door hanging wide.”

  “Did he run away? That’s just stupid. He saw what happened when those demons attacked last night. He wouldn’t last three seconds alone if another one found him.”

  “Oh, he has been found.” Ash finally managed to speak. Her voice was tight and hoarse with rage, but intelligible. Mostly. “He has been found by the nocturnis.”

  “As if that is any better.” Baen’s temper appeared to be fraying even as Ash struggled to get a grip on hers.

  “What? How can you know that? Who’s to say he didn’t just lose his mind and decide to strike off on his own? He was pretty freaked out when you guys rang the bell. He immediately decided you were the Order and you were after him.”

  Baen’s nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath. “No, it was nocturnis. You can smell them.”

  “Um, actually, no I can’t.”

  “I can,” Ash agreed. “Like the inside of a slaughterhouse. Blood and offal and Darkness. They were here, and your friend left with them.”

  “They took him? I let him get kidnapped right under my damned nose? Great. Like the plan exploding last night wasn’t bad enough. I have never lost a Warden before.”

  “I doubt you lost this one, either. I believe he wandered off all on his own.”

  “What?”

  Drum swept his hand around the room in an encompassing gesture. “Look around. There are no signs of struggle. Nothing broken, no blood. Not so much as a spilled cup or an overturned chair. If someone did take the Warden out of here against his will, he didn’t put up much of a fight.”

  “Or any fight at all,” Baen agreed. He moved to where Ash stood in the doorway they had all come in through the night before. He crouched and peered at the floor and the cobbles in the drive behind the building. “No drag marks, no scuffs. No indications anyone carried something
as heavy as a body. It appears that anyone who entered the kitchen left again under their own power, walking calmly.”

  “So what are you saying?” Ivy demanded. “Are you trying to tell me that Martin wasn’t a Warden after all? That he was some kind of imposter?”

  “Not necessarily an imposter, but perhaps one with divided loyalties. Some of us have suspected that the Guild headquarters could not have been destroyed unless a member or members had aided in the planning and execution,” Ash said. “Some of the most powerful wards and magical protections in the world guarded that place, and yet it burned to the ground, killing dozens of high-level Wardens with formidable powers of defense at their disposal. Infiltration by those under the influence of the Order seems the only logical explanation.”

  Ivy snorted. “I don’t see it’s logical to assume that anyone could possibly turn to the Darkness after having seen and learned what it’s capable of, let alone what it wants to achieve. What kind of person learns that there’s something out there that wants to destroy the world and enslave and consume humanity and says, ‘Hey, sign me up’? It’s ridiculous.”

  “It is about power,” Baen said. “It is something that has corrupted more than one devout human throughout the ages. From wise men to fools, your race seems to be vulnerable to the temptation posed by promises of power over others.”

  “Gee, thanks. Nice to know you think so highly of us.”

  Ash shrugged. “You did ask.”

  When would Ivy finally learn not to go looking for answers she knew she wouldn’t like? Not today, apparently.

  “So what do we do now?” Even if she didn’t like the answer to that question either, it was still important to know, and she damned sure had no idea of her own. “Do we go after him? Even if he doesn’t want to be rescued, which we don’t know for certain.”

  “It seems most likely he left willingly.” Drum at least tried to sound apologetic about it. He appeared to possess the only ounce of diplomacy left in the room. “When whoever came here to fetch him, he didn’t cry out for help, and he didn’t struggle. That sort of points toward him leaving voluntarily. But either way, we have no way of knowing where he’s gone, and I’m afraid we don’t have the time to mount a large-scale search. Maeve’s vision was urgent. We need to get all the Guardians we have to Paris as soon as possible.”