Hard Breaker

by Christine Warren

  She cried out, a combination of fear, surprise, and outrage, and Drum’s shouted, “Sorry!” only added to the chaos in the room. The nocturni caster shrieked in outrage, and flung a second spell, this one clearly aimed at Drum.

  The male Warden was ready for it. He mumbled a few words and raised a narrow wall of energy that deflected the sorcerer’s dark lightning bolt, dissolving it into a shower of dirty sparks that rained onto the floor in a fall of ashes. Though he could clearly defend himself, Ash equally clearly disliked that he had to. She roared out her feelings and, with one blow, sent two of her attackers flying back so she could rush to her Warden’s side.

  Drum dismissed her with a crooked grin. “I’m fine, darlin’. Watch your own back this time.”

  Baen saw his sister’s lips move in grumbled displeasure, but she clearly trusted her partner’s judgment, because she turned from him and focused once again on the armed nocturnis. He wanted to mirror her move by flying to Ivy’s aid, but Drum beat him to it. The human knelt at Ivy’s side as she slumped, clearly stunned, at the base of a wall of bookshelves. He checked her responses and clearly got some kind of positive indication, because he shouted, “She’s all right!”

  Relief surged through Baen, but he didn’t allow himself to relax. Instead he forced himself to focus back on the battle. As he turned to resume his struggle against the armed nocturnis surrounding him, he saw the second sorcerer in the hall focusing on Ivy with manic intensity. Beneath the hooded cowl, pale lips moved quickly, but Baen couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t really need to. Even as the magic user lifted his hands to release the magic he had gathered, Baen shifted, letting his natural form out in a burst of power.

  There wasn’t really enough room in the cramped space for a creature his size, but he didn’t care. His wings fluttered, spreading just enough to form a barrier between the sorcerer and Ivy’s crumpled form. The spell intended to hit her bounced off the leathery membrane instead, making the nocturnis hiss in frustration.

  The attackers gathered around Baen echoed that sentiment, now realizing their weapons had been rendered all but useless against the tough, stone hide of a Guardian’s natural skin. They must have been counting on the tight space to inhibit him and Ash from shifting, thus trapping them in their more vulnerable human skins, because the weapons they carried held no trace of magic about them. They had no chance of causing their opponents serious injury.

  “Baen!”

  Drum’s voice had Baen’s head whipping around to see the human leaning over Ivy with a worried expression.

  “Something’s going on with your girl,” the man said. “She seemed fine for a few seconds, but then her eyes glazed over, and she went totally out of it. Does she have seizures?”

  Baen did not know, but the thought distracted him long enough to allow his attackers to regroup and launch a coordinated offensive that kept him too busy to answer for several seconds. Before he could open his mouth, though, he heard her voice, weak but determined.

  “Sorry,” she groaned. “It wasn’t a seizure. I heard something.”

  Baen recalled what the woman had told him of her power and felt a wave of cold run through him like a warning.

  “There are more outside. Close by. They were doing some kind of ritual. I think they were summoning something.”

  It only gave them a few seconds of warning, but that was long enough for Baen and Ash to exchange glances and for Drum to utter something profoundly filthy. Before the syllables had even faded from the air, an overwhelming stench drifted in from the hall an instant before the form of a demon appeared in the dwelling’s small hall.

  The evil creature filled the space, blocking out everything else, absorbing light and energy like a black hole of malevolence. Shadows and flame swirled around it, not the clean, orange flame of real fire, but something darker, sickly and polluted. That alone betrayed its identity. This was an ukobahk, a servant of the Seven and among the most powerful of the minor orders of demons. To know that the Order had gained the ability to bring one here at their command offered disquieting proof of their accumulated power.

  It wore the hideous, unnatural shape of a gorilla crossed with a bull and was formed entirely out of corrupted flame. Huge horns adorned its flattened, bovine head, and when it opened its mouth, fire and lavalike streams of molten rock disgorged like vomit. Its freakishly long arms and crouched posture left its huge, curved claws dragging on the ground behind it, carving furrows in the old wooden floors. It glared at Baen with eyes lacking in intelligence but glinting with primal hate. It recognized its ancestral nemesis and it seethed.

  Baen launched himself forward. The broad sweep of his wings knocked aside the villains in his path, but he took no notice. The ukobahk leaped to meet him and demon and Guardian clashed together in a thunderous clap of fire and stone.

  Claw and fang slashed and tore and bellows of pain and rage filled the air. The sounds of battle drowned out almost everything else, but Baen could just faintly make out the sharp tone of Ash’s words ordering Drum to keep the other human safe. A moment later, the corner of the room where he had last seen Ivy lit up with a bright, pure light and Baen felt something inside him relax. Knowing his Warden would be looked after sent renewed energy and determination coursing through him, and he beat back the demon’s advance with heavy blows from his clenched, granite-hard fists.

  The beast met him blow for blow, the impact of its hits occasionally sending up a shower of sparks that scattered into the room around him. Most smoldered only a second before extinguishing themselves, but inevitably a whiff of smoke told Baen that one had settled in something like paper or fabric and begun to burn.

  Cursing, the Guardian pivoted to the side, carving out the split second he needed to summon his bardiche from the ether and swing the long, curved blade into motion. Mounted in two places at one end of the four-foot banded shaft, the razor-sharp axe blade swept back so dramatically it almost formed a crescent moon, with the bottom point secured to the handle and the top extending free to a lethally honed tip. Baen kept both edges of that end sharpened to allow thrusting and hooking slices, as well as the natural swings and hacks of combat axemanship.

  One such backhanded slice caught the ukobahk across its abdomen, sending a spill of lava to pool on the floorboards. A second fire broke out there and Baen started to see smoke fill the room as flames began to lick at the corners of his vision. He and Ash needed to get the humans out of there. If the nocturnis and their pet demon didn’t kill them, the inferno surely would.

  A quick glance around showed him that while he had faced off against the fire demon, Ash had taken care of the armed nocturnis. Slain or unconscious, they littered the floor, the last one falling under a powerful blow from her weapon. As soon as that opponent began to crumple, she flew to her partner’s side, crouching next to him. She threw one glance back at Baen, her expression fierce.

  “I will get them out. You slay the ukobahk.”

  Gladly.

  He turned back to the demon and adjusted his double-handed grip on the bardiche. The creature roared, shaking its head and tearing through the plaster around the doorway with its broadly set horns. The show of aggression didn’t impress Baen. He flashed it a mouthful of fang and then sprang.

  His blade swung before him, cleaving through the thick smoke and then the burning shape of the monster’s flesh. One stroke severed clean through its neck, and its head rolled off one shoulder to bounce at his feet.

  Immediately, the thing’s flame went out, like a snuffed candle. The shape it had maintained on this plane ceased to hold together. It imploded on itself in a shower of charcoal and ash, leaving nothing behind but a sooty pile on the hallway floor.

  Baen threw back his head and howled in victory. His foe lay vanquished on the field. Now was the time to celebrate his warrior’s prowess.

  Except for the matter of the burning house and his wounded Warden.

  He spun back to locate the others, but all he found was th
e open window nearby. Ash had spirited them outside and hopefully out of danger.

  Sending his weapon away with a thought, Baen forced himself to breathe deeply in order to bring on another shift. His human skin felt especially tight after the heat of battle, but if he needed to go out onto the humans’ streets, it would not do to wear his natural form.

  Also, there was no way he would have gotten his wings out that stingy window opening. As it was, he nearly scraped the skin off his back on his way through. Stupid puny human architecture.

  He used his senses to pick up the trail of Guardian and Wardens, jogging after the faint traces of citrus and white stone in the air. A few minutes later, he found them clustered around a bench in a small green square a few streets from the house. Immediately, he pushed forward to kneel at Ivy’s side.

  She half lay, slumped against the back of the bench, while Ash paced behind her and Drum sat close, holding on to one of her small, pale hands as he peered into her bloodshot eyes. Baen couldn’t suppress his growl.

  Instantly Drum dropped her hand and eased back, his mouth quirking. “She hit that wall pretty hard, and then the … well, whatever you want to call it … what she heard. That seems to have taken some of her energy,” he said. “But her pulse is strong and steady, and I don’t see any evidence of a concussion. I’m not a doctor, but I know basic first aid and what to look out for. I think she’ll be fine.”

  Knowing that the Irishman had merely been looking after Ivy’s health should have made Baen feel better, but he still found himself giving in to the urge to insinuate himself between them. He gathered both her hands in his and squeezed gently.

  “Are you all right, little one?” he asked. “Were you hurt? Do you require medical attention?”

  She shook her head, wincing a little and pressing her fingers to her temple at the motion. “What I need is a stiff shot of bourbon and some intensive psychotherapy,” she muttered. “Did I really just see a bloody demon? Is that what that thing was? Was that one of the Seven?”

  Ash snorted. “If it had been, more than a single house would have been destroyed, and we would likely not all be standing here now. That was a mere minion. Pray you never have to come face-to-face with one of its masters.”

  “Yeah, I think that ship has sailed.” Ivy grimaced. “Or did the plans to go to Paris and help stop them from taking over the world change while I was semiconscious?”

  “It just got a bit more pressing, I think.” Drum stood and circled around the bench to sling one arm around Ash’s shoulder. He pulled her against him, and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Your friend from last night must have alerted the Order to a new Guardian being woken. That’s the first fire demon we’ve seen. Before this, they seemed to be relying mostly on hhissihh and ghouls. You’ve prompted them to up their game.” He nodded at Baen.

  The Guardian snarled. “I would have preferred the element of surprise.”

  “That no longer appears to be a tool in our arsenal,” Ash said, her mouth tight and expression hard. “We must now hurry to gather our forces. We definitely cannot afford to spend time combing the globe for our last sleeping brother. But this attack does offer us some valuable information.”

  “Such as?”

  “It makes clear that the man you dealt with last night is indeed a traitor to the Guild,” the female Guardian said. “Where there was one, there will be more, which removes the last doubt regarding complicity from within the Guild before the purge of the Wardens began. But more importantly, it tells us that the Order will know for certain the information you had on the gathering of Wardens in France. They will know that the survivors have banded together there.”

  “And they’ll go after them,” Ivy declared. She squeezed her eyes shut and let out a few curses Baen would never have predicted she might use. Not unless she had a past in the merchant marines that she had failed to tell him about. “We need to get to Paris, like, yesterday. We need to warn them the Order will be coming for them.”

  “If they’re not idiots, they already know that,” Drum said. “But we can warn them that they’ll be coming soon, and probably in pretty decent numbers.”

  Ivy turned to meet Baen’s gaze, her own gone cloudy with a mix of emotions so complex, she couldn’t begin to name them all. “We should leave now. Right now. Maybe we can find a boat to sneak us into France via an unmonitored beach. I don’t even want to take the time to go find my passport.”

  Baen shook his head. He offered a squeeze of reassurance to her trembling fingers. “Any attempt to travel covertly requires either careful planning or the cover of darkness. We might not have time for the first, but I believe we have no choice but to wait for the second. We cannot leave for France before nightfall. There will be time to retrieve your passport, but you won’t need it. We will fly to Paris.”

  “If we fly, I’m definitely going to need a passport, and so are you. There’s no other way to get on a plane these days. Can you, you know, magic something up?”

  Baen quirked a brow at her. “Who said anything about planes?”

  Chapter Ten

  Ivy was still arguing with him two hours later. A quick hop across London was one thing, and it had still nearly given her a heart attack. No way was she willing to cross the English frickin’ Channel with nothing between her and the icy-cold-water-slash-certain-death thing but Mr. Grabbyhands’s overinflated ego. Uh-uh. No way. Not. Happening.

  Ever.

  As it turned out, Baen appeared to suffer from the same sort of situational deafness around the word “no” that the average basset hound suffered around the word “come.” Maybe she should try tossing kibble at him, see if that helped encourage the proper responses. They had hours to kill before dark, when the Guardian apparently planned to scoop her up in his arms and carry her like a sack of potatoes across the rough seas and rocky shores separating England from France. Plenty of time to run down to the market and pick up a few Milk-Bones for the occasion.

  At the moment, Baen was looking entirely too at home sprawled across seven-eighths of her sofa while she paced back and forth around the flat, ostensibly packing a few essentials for their trip, but really trying to figure out if there was anything here in Cousin Jamie’s home that qualified as large and heavy enough to knock some sense into that supernaturally thick skull.

  She doubted it. Personally, she was coming to the conclusion that nuclear weaponry might not be sufficient. And she had always thought she was stubborn to a fault.

  Ha!

  “You have to be reasonable about this,” she tried again as she shoved a couple of pairs of panties into a backpack, wishing for a second they were made of lead and aimed at the back of his head. “Ash and Drum took a plane back to Ireland, so it’s not like you can claim you can’t fit on a commercial airline. It’s clearly possible.”

  “It carries too much risk. My way is simpler. We need not worry about the hu—the authorities, nor the arbitrary schedules of corporations. We leave when we want, we arrive when we want. No delays, no hassles, and no chance we will miss this arranged meeting with your contact. It is a much more sensible plan.”

  “Except for the whole increased chance of death and dismemberment, sure.”

  He nodded. “Good. Then it is settled.”

  She bit back a frustrated scream. “It is not settled. Baen—” She cut herself off and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The argument was giving her a headache of massive proportions.

  Ivy never heard the huge Guardian move, but before she had time to haul in a deep breath and pray for strength, she felt his big hands land on her shoulders and press gently.

  “What is wrong?” he demanded in that rough, tumbling-stones voice of his. “You were injured earlier, weren’t you? I knew we should have taken you to be examined by a doctor. You could have internal damage. Bleeding, or a brain injury.”

  She lowered her hands and forced herself not to react to the hot tingling sensation that flooded through her at his lightest to
uch. She had to be imagining it. Not only was this about the least appropriate time to find herself ensnared in a helpless sexual attraction, but Baen was definitely the least appropriate object for her feelings. Wrong species, wrong temperament, wrong attitude, wrong everything.

  Yeah. So I’ll just stand here in my wrongness and be wrong and get used to it, she told herself, quoting from one of her favorite old television shows. Maybe I’ll even change my middle name. Ivy Wrong Beckett is much better than Ivy Fitzroy Beckett. It’ll make for a snazzy new monogram, too. I can buy embroidered towels …

  She took a step back, trying to put some distance between herself and the shockingly warm Guardian. Honestly, it would make things a lot easier if he would just be cold and stony and emotionless like she had expected a Guardian would be. This concerned, hot, sexy, protective-male thing was hell on her hormones.

  Hey, maybe that was it. Maybe she could chalk this all up to some exotic hormonal imbalance, and get a doctor’s note to prove it: To whom it may concern—this memo is to certify that my patient, Ivy Wrong Beckett, suffers from a severe, congenital case of Excessive Gargoyle-atropin Hormone Syndrome (or EGHS disease) and cannot be held legally or morally accountable for her own actions. She is not really a giant slut.

  Yeah. That would be awesome.

  Unfortunately, for every inch she tried to put between herself and Baen, he seemed determined to take away two. He refused to release her shoulders and drew her to a stop before she could slide out from under his grip. He never applied too much pressure, never crossed into causing her the tiniest discomfort; he simply refused to surrender his hold.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Just like she’d said a thousand times since they regrouped in that square while the local fire crew responded to the blaze they had just escaped. “I wasn’t hurt, I was only a little rattled and dazed from the auditory episode. I don’t need a doctor. Or an overprotective, rock-headed nursemaid.”

  Baen’s eyes narrowed. “Nursemaid? You think me a hovering female? Perhaps drastic action is needed to change your mind.”