Hard Breaker

by Christine Warren

  Ivy could feel the impatience beginning to build in the room. Rose’s story might be heartfelt and affecting, but she still hadn’t told them what they really wanted to know—why had they stayed hidden so long, and where was Ghrem now?

  Ash voiced their concerns. “And perhaps if you had made a different choice, we would have come to you sooner and helped you to put down the Order before their cause advanced this far. Did you think of that?”

  To Ivy’s shock, Rose reacted to the accusation by smiling.

  “Believe me, Guardian, I have thought of little else.” She bowed her head for a moment, then gathered herself to continue. “I will spare you the details of the time we spent constantly running from the Order and their minions. Eventually, frustration with our elusiveness made the nocturnis turn their attention back to their strategy to wipe out the Guild. If they neutralized the Wardens, they believed the rest of the Guardians would remain asleep and the greatest force for the opposition would no longer be a threat. That was bad enough, but we quickly learned that they had an even more dangerous plan. They began to work on freeing the Seven.”

  “We know that,” Fil said. “They succeeded, too. At least four times.”

  Rose turned her head and met the blonde’s gaze. “Six. All but one walk free even as we speak. Only Belgrethnakkar remains imprisoned.”

  The Guardians erupted, knocking over chairs and shouting expletives, demanding explanations and details so that they could go after the Demons immediately. No one could accuse them of not being passionate about their work, Ivy conceded, but as she exchanged glances with the other Wardens, she thought the women might all be thinking the same thing—that the big, bad warriors needed to take a deep breath and realize that sound tactics always emerged victorious over blind rage.

  If the galumphs didn’t chill out and start thinking instead of simply reacting, they were going to get themselves—and every other being on the face of the planet—killed. Personally, Ivy had other plans for her future.

  Unfortunately, the Guardians were on a roll. They stomped around, shouting and gesticulating, several of them spontaneously shifting hands into claws or starting to sprout wings before they got themselves back under control. It was crazy, and it was so loud that they couldn’t hear any of their Wardens’ urgings to calm down and plant their asses back in their chairs.

  Finally, Drum made a sour face, climbed up onto the table, put his fingers to his lips, and gave a whistle so loud and shrill that silence immediately descended. Except for the distant howling of a dog coming from outside the manor.

  Seriously, it had been that loud.

  When Ivy shot Drum a look that conveyed how impressed she was, he shrugged and slid back into his chair. “My pub gets a wee bit rowdy now and then. Sometimes, I need to get the customers’ attention.”

  “Thank you, Warden.” Rose nodded to him and made shooing motions to urge the Guardians back to their seats. They ignored her, of course, but at least they kept quiet. “No one is more disturbed by this situation than Ghrem and I—”

  “Then where the bloody hell is he?” Baen demanded. “No more secrets or evasions. Where is our brother?”

  “He is in the between, personally guarding the entrance to the Seed of Darkness’s prison.”

  Baen sucked in a breath and actually backed up a step. Several of the other Guardians looked as if they’d just been clocked upside the head with cricket bats, and Wynn the witch looked as if she wanted to throw up. She pressed her fingers against her lips and opened her eyes so wide that Ivy wanted to find her a bucket, stat. Whatever Rose had just said had knocked most of the room for a loop, but Ivy had no idea what it meant.

  She supposed the only way to find out was to ask. “Um, would someone care to explain what the hell that means? You know, for us slow kids. I thought the prisons holding the Seven Demons were supposed to be on some other plane, and I’m not a physicist or anything, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of other dimensions having doors. Unless it’s like the scare factory in Monsters, Inc., and that movie was just way ahead of its time.”

  “The door isn’t literal,” Rose said. “And you are correct that the prisons do not exist on this plane. The power of the Seven is too much to be contained by any force that operates in our reality. In order to imprison it, they must be banished to other realms entirely. The between is…” The woman paused and made a face, as if confused as to how to define it. “It is what is between our realm and all the others,” she finished.

  Lamely.

  “Wow, that’s so helpful. Really clears things up.”

  “It’s a pretty abstract concept, Ivy. It’s not exactly easy to explain,” Wynn said, moving her fingers away from her mouth to reach out for her Guardian. He returned immediately to her side and grasped her hands in his. “The between isn’t tangible. From a lot of perspectives, it doesn’t really exist. It’s like standing in a doorway between two rooms. For that moment you’re not in one room or the other, you’re on the threshold, which is another space entirely.”

  Ivy tried to picture that and felt a headache coming on. “You’re right. It’s not easy to explain, because I still don’t get it.”

  “You don’t really have to. All you have to understand is that things aren’t meant to linger in the between, just like they aren’t meant to linger in doorways. To do either has the potential to cause all sorts of trouble. It’s incredibly, unbelievably dangerous, and if Ghrem is really there, then he’s taking a major risk.”

  Rose nodded. “Believe me, he knows. As do I. We have searched again and again for another way to ensure the Order cannot free the last of their Masters, but this has been the only thing that has kept the Seed of Darkness contained. You all know what will happen if all of the Seven make it into our realm at once. They will be united, and the Darkness will descend upon our world.”

  “Which I think we can all agree would be totally ferkakta,” Kylie piped up from the other end of the table. She had dragged Dag back to his chair, and he in turn had tugged his tiny mate into his lap. She addressed them all from her perch there like a queen from her throne (a deranged queen from a throne prone to glaring at anyone who looked at her cross-eyed, but still). “The thing is, Rosie-posy, that I think the reason you did finally get us all together in one place is not because of how dire the situation is now; it’s because you and your pals Baldy and Hunky over there have a plan.”

  Kylie waved a hand in the direction of Aldous and Thiago, who had sat through the entire morning silent and watchful. Thiago smiled at the hacker, and Dag didn’t just glare, he bared his fangs and snarled a warning at the handsome Spaniard. Apparently he wasn’t thrilled that his mate referred to the other man as “hunky.”

  “So.” Kylie ignored her mate and raised an eyebrow in Rose’s direction. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”

  A grin split Rose’s face, transforming her features from cool and elegant to vibrant and gorgeous. “I’d love to,” she purred, and Ivy actually leaned forward in her seat.

  She had to hear this.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Okay, so maybe Ivy hadn’t needed to hear Rose’s plan quite so badly. Was it too late to take back her enthusiasm? Because to be honest, her original reaction had been predicated on the idea that any idea developed by a genuine Warden with two years to plan and prepare would be a sound one. After all, Rose had experience, legitimate talent, and a house full of Guild members to help her devise the surest, safest, and most effective way to stand against the Darkness and neutralize their threat for good.

  Yet with all that going for her, the Frenchwoman had come up with a strategy best described as “Rub ourselves with raw liver, jump into the lion’s den, and then hope for the best.”

  Really? As in, Are you fucking kidding me?

  But no, Rose had assured them, she was completely serious. Thiago had been able to re-create the spell that the Wardens had used when they stood beside the first Guardians and ban
ished the Seven Demons of the Darkness from the human plane, imprisoning them apart from this world and from each other.

  Ivy would be the first to admit that Thiago’s work represented an amazing achievement, one for which he should be congratulated and offered the thanks of the Guild, if not the entire human world. Unfortunately, he and Rose both now claimed that in order to repeat the casting of said spell, they would have to first gather all six escaped Demons into one place and face them directly, performing the ritual in the presence of the evil itself.

  And that’s pretty much when it stopped sounding like such a good idea.

  Baen had been among the first to question the strategy. Loudly.

  He hadn’t been wild about the idea of gathering six of the Seven together—in one spot, he had shouted—and then allowing the Wardens, including his mate—HIS MATE (that one was more like a bellow)—to get close enough to them to cast a spell directly on the embodiments of the Eternal Darkness.

  How could they possibly have come up with a worse idea? Baen had demanded. Then he had replied to his own question before anyone else had the chance and declared that the answer was, they couldn’t. It was physically and theoretically impossible to even entertain an idea with such intrinsic badness as that one, the Guardian had declared, and his brothers (and sister) had agreed with him. The entire plan was predicated on risking the lives of the Wardens, and as such, none of their mates were willing to allow it.

  Looking back, Ivy figured it was the repeated use of the word “allow,” accompanied by the word “not,” that sparked the melee that had followed.

  Being a group of highly intelligent and rather independent-minded individuals, none of the Wardens responded well to being forbidden from anything by their mates. More than one voice rose several decibels, and at one particularly memorable moment, a decorative silver memento box was snatched off a table and flung with great force and no little accuracy at the head of a particularly stubborn Guardian. He ducked, but Kylie’s gesture still seemed to have made its point—the relationship between a Guardian and a Warden was a partnership, and everyone needed to remember that.

  While Ivy appreciated the sentiment, and agreed with it in principle, she wasn’t so certain she objected to Baen’s position. After all, he was only trying to stop her from doing something her gut told her was roughly equivalent to standing in the middle of some train tracks and asking politely that the locomotive barreling toward her consider not turning her into human-flavored jelly. Could she really blame him for that?

  And there was the other million-dollar question of the moment: not just, could she really blame Baen for trying to protect his mate, but did she believe that’s what she was? Did they really have that kind of connection?

  Did she want them to?

  Ivy looked out over the gardens from her position on a small terrace at the side of the manor house, and grimaced. It had been a week since they had arrived and almost as long since the meeting at which Rose and Thiago had revealed their plan, and Ivy had gotten no closer to answering that fundamental question. How did she feel about her giant, overprotective, and occasionally overbearing new friend?

  You know, aside from bloody confused.

  She couldn’t deny the connection between them, no matter how much easier doing so would have made her life. It was just there, a kind of invisible cord stretching between them no matter where they went or what they were doing. She felt it just as strongly when they were at opposite ends of the grounds—she learning to work magic from the other Wardens while he sparred with his siblings to keep their skills honed and their bodies occupied—as she did when they lay next to each other in her bed at night.

  And that, she admitted, wasn’t exactly helping her to clear her head. Her brain told her that if she wanted to make a real decision about where she and Baen stood, she ought to stop jumping his bones every chance she got. The trouble was, that was easier said than done. Or not done, as the case may be, because when they got together, there always seemed to be an awful lot of doing going on.

  Physically, Ivy couldn’t resist him. He’d become this powerful drug, and no matter how she told herself after each encounter that it would be the last, the minute she laid eyes on him again, she wanted him. No, she needed him, like a junkie needed a fix, and that frightened her.

  Just not enough.

  Not enough to stay away from him, at any rate. Every night, she climbed into bed beside him, and then ended up climbing him like her own personal Everest. Either that, or he climbed in with her, and she welcomed him with open arms, not to mention open thighs. She felt kind of like a slut afterward, but in the moment, all she felt was hunger and heat and something frighteningly like … affection.

  Ivy leaned against the balustrade separating the terrace from the grounds and dug her fingers into the cold stone. You’d think the sensation would ground her, but oh no, it just made her think about Baen, about the way his skin felt when he carried her through the air in his winged form, such a contrast to the smooth heat of his human shape. Both of them enthralled her, which only gave her another reason to worry.

  She had never felt this way before, not about anyone. She was twenty-seven, for pity’s sake, and she lived in the modern world. She’d had crushes and boyfriends, lovers and even one relationship she had thought of for a while as the One. She’d thought she’d been in love. Hell, she’d thought she had run the gamut, from infatuation to genuine affection to hormone-inspired madness to real love, and none of them had prepared her for the way she felt around Baen.

  Cue waves of terror.

  How was it that this man who wasn’t even a man could make her feel things she had never experienced before? And, even more than that, how did she trust that any of it was real? With all this talk of Fate and magic and mates and destiny, how could she know that what she felt came from her, from her own heart and her own mind, and not from some cosmic force using her like a Barbie doll to act out its own grand plan. Maybe on her own, she would have chosen to settle down with Ken, but instead, the universe had scooped her up, paired her with G.I. Joe, and forced these feelings on her for some unfathomable reason of its own.

  The idea terrified her, and her way of looking at it might be a bit silly, but was it really outside the realm of possibility? If she really was “fated” to be with Baen, then where did that leave room for free will and the autonomy she needed to develop feelings for him (or for anyone else) naturally? Wasn’t she supposed to have a choice in determining her soul mate? The way Baen described their relationship, she wasn’t so sure.

  The uncertainty made her want to run. The way she felt when she was with Baen made her want to stay.

  Bloody hell.

  She blew out a breath, watching it steam up in the crisp evening air. One of these days, she was going to discover who had stood over her crib in the hospital nursery and blessed her with an interesting life. When she did, the bugger was getting a good swift kick right in the babymaker.

  The jerk.

  When it came right down to it, all her confusion stemmed from the dichotomy of the way she felt when she was with Baen compared to the way she felt when she was on her own, like this, with time to think. So really, you could say that thinking was her enemy; it only made her doubt herself, while Baen just made her feel good.

  Really, really good.

  It would make her life so much easier if she could shift all the blame for her situation onto his shoulders. After all, they were more than broad enough to bear the burden. If she told herself often enough that Baen’s presence distracted her, that his touch clouded her mind, and that sex with him completely cut her off from reality, maybe she could start viewing all those as bad things, instead of as the bright moments in a present full of fear and anxiety and the possibility of doom hanging over the world. Make Baen the villain, and let herself off the hook.

  Kind of hard to do, though, now that she’d seen the real villains. Having looked into the faces of demons and nocturnis, the intrinsic
and uncompromising honor and goodness of the Guardians couldn’t be denied, not even for the sake of Ivy’s sanity. Which left her right back where she’d started—enthralled, terrified, and having no idea what to do with the giant, sexy creature who occupied her bed and seemed determined to convince her to let him stay there forever.

  “You’ve got a look about you that says you could go one of two ways.” A voice interrupted her brooding, and she glanced to her right to see Michael Drummond stroll to a stop against a neighboring piece of terrace railing. “Either you really need a friend to talk to, or you have a grapefruit spoon in your pocket and plans to use it on the next set of bollocks that get within striking distance. I’m hoping it’s the former, but if not, I’m hoping my longer legs will provide the advantage of speed in getting away.”

  His words and wry smile startled a snort of laughter from her. “Yeah, I’ll let you know when I decide. How’s that sound?”

  “Fair enough.” Drum leaned a hip against the balustrade and looked from her to the scenery spread out beyond the small, flagstoned patio. “The views here aren’t bad. For France, anyway.”

  Ivy glanced at him. “Not that you could possibly be biased about scenery, or anything.”

  “I’ll admit we’ve a vista or two back home worth noting.” He grinned. “Have you been to Ireland?”

  “Once. I spent some time touring the south. Cork, Kerry, Waterford. It was beautiful.”

  “It is that.”

  Silence descended, not an uncomfortable one, but one that felt too heavy to be empty. Still, she had enough to keep her mind busy without pressing the friendly Irishman to state his business.

  Ivy had gotten to know all the Wardens a little in the past week, and she’d come to like Drum. He was a nice guy, mostly low-key and good-natured, with a quick smile and a laid-back, somewhat dry sense of humor. She found him an interesting contrast to his Guardian, Ash, the only female Guardian ever summoned. Where her Warden came across as mellow and kind, Ash seemed much more intense, serious, and almost brooding. They didn’t seem like a good match, and yet they fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, tab A into slot B. Perfect.