Hard to Handle--A Beauty and Beast Novel

by Christine Warren

  Kylie squeezed his arm and stayed close, not releasing her grip as they waited for the Guardians to complete their reconnaissance of the silent cave. He tried to stay patient and to remind himself that the Guardians were experts in both warfare and the machinations of the nocturnis. That made them better equipped to check out the cavern than anyone else around and to do so efficiently and safely. But the next ten minutes still dragged on for a minimum of three or four weeks.

  When Drum felt the first stirring of air across his face, he thought at first that he’d imagined it, but it came a second time, a little stronger. Peering into the darkness, he thought he saw something shift and was finally able to make out Ash’s shape returning through the gloom. She had used her wings to create a small breeze as a warning that she and Dag were approaching.

  Kylie inhaled sharply and gave his arm a final squeeze. He felt a touch of surprise at the small tells. She had seemed so calm and confident when she tried to reassure him that he hadn’t stopped to think she might be feeling something similar for her own Guardian. Then she slipped past him to grab Dag in a quick, fierce hug that allowed Drum to see right through her cool, calm, and collected routine.

  Lying little pixie.

  “Is it safe to talk?” she asked. “What did you find?”

  Ash wrapped her fingers around Drum’s and shook her head. He could feel the end of her braid brush against his arm. “It is a stairway. Going down. The light shines up from below. We could see very little and hear nothing at all.”

  “But what’s the source of the light?” Drum demanded. “Torches or something?”

  “Hellfire,” Dag bit off.

  “Um, I’m going to assume that’s not you cursing, sweetie,” Kylie murmured. “So, that’s the source of the light and the smell?”

  “But what’s down there? And how the hell did a stairway just appear in an underground cavern under an unexceptional ruin in the middle of the Kildare countryside?” Drum demanded, struggling to keep his voice low. “How does something like that even happen?”

  “It does not.” Ash sounded grim. “This tells us something very important, however. These caverns—this one and the one below—are important to the nocturnis, and have been used by them before. The stair is old. It appears to have been carved centuries ago. I believe that regaining access to this place was the reason for the earthquakes. The Order needed to find a way down here.”

  “And they’ve never bloody well heard of shovels?”

  Ash squeezed his hand. “Perhaps they knew only the general area in which the caverns lay. If that knowledge had somehow been lost, if they did not have an exact map of the entrances, magic might have seemed a more expedient choice.”

  “Throw a few spells and get the ground to open up for you?” Kylie asked. “Lazy schmucks.”

  “But what makes these particular caves so important?” Drum asked, frowning into the darkness. “That’s what I don’t understand. Not just important enough to search for, but important enough that hundreds of years ago, some group of lunatics spent enough time in them to build a stone stairway down to a lower level?”

  “The stairs do not simply lead to a lower part of the cave, human,” Dag grumbled. “They lead to that level because in the chamber below us, the Order has secreted a hellmouth.”

  “A what?”

  Drum didn’t have time for a longer question. Or anything else. Before the last word cleared his lips, a horrible, shrill noise cut through the quiet, black reaches of the cave. The air around them seemed to shiver. At first, he thought he had imagined the strange effect, but then several pairs of glowing-coal eyes flicked open, and he knew this was no hallucination.

  “Bloody fucking hell,” he cursed, not bothering to keep his voice down anymore. “More fucking shadelings!”

  “Um, I don’t think that’s our big problem at the moment,” Kylie said. She raised her hands and he could see that one held a glowing orb of light aloft among them and the second pointed to a spot just above the entrance to the lower cavern. “Dag? Is that what I think it is?”

  “Shadow!” he roared and flung himself across the room. Ash cursed in some dead language and flew after him.

  Confused and angry, Drum spun to look at his only remaining companion. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” the American gasped. “Incoming!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Drum spun at the sound of Kylie’s shouted warning, but he was just a little too slow. A shadeling raced toward him from the shadows and threw itself against him, knocking him to the ground.

  He had no idea how it happened. After all, the shadeling was a creature made of black mist, incorporeal and opaque only because of its coloring. If the thing had been white or gray, he could probably have read a newspaper through at least the lower half of its not-quite body. It should have lacked the mass to hit him, let alone knock him down, but Drum landed on his arse just the same.

  Well, maybe it hadn’t been the impact that sent him tumbling, but the odd sensation that accompanied it. He had to admit that the creature hadn’t bounced off him, but rather passed through him, like a ghost in an old-fashioned horror movie. It felt almost like a strong, cold wind, but instead of chilling his skin and muscle, this sensation went straight to the marrow of his bones, deep into his center to deposit a layer of frost over his heart and lungs and liver and spleen. He had the thought that if he had swallowed a bucketful of ice cubes while buried to his neck in a snowdrift, he could not have possibly felt colder. He couldn’t even bring himself to shiver, and wasn’t that supposed to be one of the signs that hypothermia had become so advanced that death was imminent?

  Fuck that. Drum had no intention of dying today, and he certainly wouldn’t do it because of one puny little example of the same spook he’d kicked ass on just a few days before. And that time there had been five of them, and only one of him. This was a done deal.

  You know, as soon as he managed to haul himself up off the floor.

  He rolled to the side and used his arms to steady himself while he dragged his knees beneath them. All right, all fours. This was progress. He could hear a stream of words he guessed were most likely Yiddish, and judging by her tone of voice, Kylie had not engaged the other shadelings in polite conversation.

  When he managed to regain his feet, he turned enough to realize that he could now see a fairly large area around him. The American Warden had illuminated the darkness by the practical method of lobbing ball after ball of bright, pale green light into the surrounding swarm of shadelings. Any time one of her balls struck, its unfortunate target would screech and explode in a shower of black particles.

  She worked with an ease and efficiency that Drum couldn’t hope to match, but he recognized the principle behind her strategy as the same one he had unintentionally employed during his own encounters with these entities. He might be swaying a little on his feet, but he’d be damned if he sat back and let Kylie do all the work, especially since he lost count of the pairs of shadeling eyes somewhere around two dozen. Those were not sporting odds.

  It seemed equally close to cheating in his opinion when the shadeling that had passed through him rebounded from the shadows to take another pass at him. This time, though, Drum was ready. He lifted a hand and felt a surge of energy well up from his core. He let it flow through him and pour out through his palm in an increasingly familiar blast of pale golden light. The light stream hit the shadeling’s center mass and made the entity go poof.

  Hey, that was almost fun, he thought as he spun to face the next attacking creature. Not that he planned to turn this into a hobby, or anything, but there was a certain satisfaction in blowing something away while having absolutely no doubt that one had chosen to do the exact right thing. Of course, he supposed there were plenty of psycho killers in the world who had the same thoughts, but they weren’t the ones fighting actual monsters. That gave him a pretty big edge on the old righteous-o-meter.

  “Good w
ork!” Kylie flashed him a grin even as she launched two green missiles at two separate shadelings. Both hit and took out their intended targets. “With a little practice, I think we’ll be bringing you up to the majors, kid.”

  Drum snorted and flung another blast of energy (he still stumbled over thinking of it as magic) that sailed past a dodging shadow with glowing red eyes. He cursed. Loudly.

  “Like I said. Practice.”

  “And doesn’t that sound like a laugh?” he muttered.

  Between Kylie and himself, they managed to whittle the opposition down until Drum could finally peer through the remaining black mist and catch a glimpse of what the Guardians had gone up against. The magic flying around had generated some ambient light, but as it turned out he could have watched the whole thing by firelight, because the thing Ash and Dag were facing had set the stone floor of the cavern on fire.

  Flames flickered between the Guardians and what looked almost as if a thousand shadelings had joined together to form a pool of darkness so thick the fabric of reality seemed to disappear behind it. It possessed all the mass that the smaller entities had lacked, with broad shoulders and thick, elongated limbs that gave it unnatural strides and an impossible reach. It didn’t shift and shiver like its amorphous younger cousins, but its solid form seemed to dissolve around the edges. Little wisps of black mist drifted away like puffs of steam. Its eyes did not remind him of glowing coals but of deep, yawning tunnels to the molten center of hell.

  Something told him that was exactly where this thing had come from. He didn’t know or care if it was another plane or a religious construct, this thing made it seem very, very real.

  He had to divide his attention between dispatching the remaining shadelings and keeping an eye on the bigger battle. By the time the last entity exploded, looking and sounding something like the negative image of a Roman candle, he figured that he owed his new friend from Boston something in the neighborhood of three dozen pints and the name of his firstborn child. Coming out of the situation intact but exhausted made him think he’d caught the light end of the bargain.

  Placing his hands on his knees, he gave himself a minute to catch his breath and beat down the instinctive fear that tried to crawl up his throat like bile. Then he straightened his shoulders and began to cross the distance between him and the enormous, malevolent shadow.

  Kylie fisted a hand in the back of his shirt and tucked him to a halt. “What, are you meshugah? Stay where you are, rookie. Let the first-liners handle this one.”

  Drum started to protest. Why the hell should they stand around and just watch when they could help their Guardians win the fight?

  A sound like a barn owl caught in the throat of an angry tiger detonated in the cavern with the force of a ten-ton bomb. It shook loose a shower of dust and pebbles from the ceiling of the cave and made both humans slap their hands over their ears and wince. Kylie snapped forward at the waist as if preparing to vomit, and Drum swayed on his feet as he turned in time to see Ash swing her axe in a blow that buried the lethal blade in the middle of the Shadow’s chest.

  The axe hung there in the wound it had created, exposing what looked like glowing magma around the edges. It drew his attention to the fact that the Shadow no longer appeared completely black. Dozens of small injuries showed in scratches and pinpricks of orange-red light that marred the thing’s surface. The two warriors had worried at it like terriers—supernatural, winged terriers—weakening it in preparation for a concerted attack.

  Drum felt a surge of satisfaction, and waited to see his teammates deliver the final blow. He reminded himself that next time he might want to bring along some pretzels.

  The monster flung Ash away from it, sending her a good twenty-five feet through the air before she used her wings to turn her momentum into a graceful somersault. She hovered for a moment then darted in again as if intending to retrieve her weapon for another assault.

  He thought he might have shouted something, but any sound he could have made got swallowed up in the guttural fury of Dag’s battle cry. The burly Guardian dropped into a crouch to avoid the Shadow’s swiping claws, then thrust himself upward with all the strength in his tree-trunk legs. He flew to the top of the cavern, the beat of his wings sending up a sirocco of dirt and dust into the atmosphere. Drum flung up an arm to protect his eyes, but he still managed to catch sight of the Guardian’s massive hammer as it slammed down hard on the monster’s skull. Or, at least, where its skull would have been had it possessed anything like a skeletal anatomy.

  The blow thundered through the cave, and Drum saw a crack appear at the top of the Shadow. It sent a small chunk of darkness flying, and the crack began to snake in a crooked line down the surface of the black mass. For a second the creature looked like an inhuman version of photographs of America’s Liberty Bell, but then the fissure began to widen and the resemblance disappeared in a burst of sulfurous flame.

  Pieces of dark matter fell to the ground as the shape of the Shadow monster split down the center, as if someone had pulled the tab on an enormous, evil zipper. The creature costume fell away, and a geyser of hellfire spewed toward the cavern ceiling. It lit the entire chamber and made Drum grateful he had not yet lowered his arm. Getting a speck of dirt in his eye would have been painful and annoying, but losing his sight from the supernatural equivalent of staring straight into the sun would have ruined his entire day.

  The conflagration lasted no more than a couple of seconds. When it died out, it took a moment for Drum to identify the metallic ringing in his ears as the sound of Ash’s battle-axe clanging against the cave’s stone floor. When the Shadow had fallen apart it had released the blade, which had dropped and landed on a small pile of smoldering coals.

  Ash landed calmly next to the remains and scooped up her weapon. She cast her gaze over her companions and juggled her grip with alarming ease. “Was that everything?”

  Drum almost choked to death when he tried to swallow a laugh and a scream on the same breath. Kylie gave him a helpful and surprisingly forceful thump between the shoulder blades with one hand, and shot the Guardian a thumbs-up sign with the other. “We took care of the shadelings, so I’m going to suggest it’s a good time for us to make like it’s Passover and Exodus on out of here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Drum coughed and struggled to regain his breath. “I thought someone was going to explain to me what that thing you just killed was, and what the hell he meant when he said those stairs lead down to a hellmouth.” He poked a finger in Dag’s direction with what was likely somewhat excessive force.

  “Um, we can totally do that,” she said as she returned to her mate’s side, “but maybe we want to save Story Time: The Hellmouth Edition for when we are not standing just a few feet from one.”

  “Agreed.”

  The nervous glance toward the stairway with which Dag, one of the most powerful beings Drum could imagine, accompanied his concurrence made Drum pause to rethink. Maybe the fellow had a point. After all, what was story time without biscuits and cocoa?

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Enough stalling,” Drum mumbled around a mouthful of his mother’s bread still warm from the oven and all but dripping with fresh country butter. “Explain to me how the twelve-ton gorilla in the cave was a shadow. I’ve seen shadows, and they don’t usually put their fists through solid rock or burst into flame.”

  On the other side of the archway, Maddie sighed and shook her head as she stirred an enormous pot of stew. “Michael, please. At least make an effort not to look the complete mannerless gurrier in front of my guests.”

  Ash hid a smile behind her own slice of slightly sweet golden bread. The four of them had returned to the Drummond house tired, thirsty, dirty, and famished. Maddie had immediately herded them inside, set up a rotation through the shower, and begun preparing dinner. While Ash had told Drum that the angels and devils of religious teaching might not exist, his mother was making her doubt her own mind. That woman deserved a halo and a kingdo
m in the heavens, without a doubt.

  Dag had already polished off his fourth slice of bread, so he was the one who answered the question. “Not shadow. Shadow.”

  Drum stared as if the Guardian had spoken in ancient Enochian.

  “The second one starts with a capital S,” Kylie clarified. “It’s like a proper name, or an official title.”

  “Then I’m guessing it wasn’t just a slightly larger version of the shadelings.”

  “Only if Godzilla is a slightly larger version of the paddle-tail newt.”

  Ash finished her bread and licked a smear of butter off her thumb. “The shadelings and the hhissih both are among the most minor minions of the Darkness.”

  “Also with the capital letter,” Kylie threw in.

  “They exist on a plane so close to our own that they can pass between them quite easily. As you saw in the cavern, this allows them to seemingly swarm out of nowhere with very little warning, almost as if they have been lurking here in the shadows all along.”

  “Not their most pleasant trait,” Drum said.

  “But not the worst, either. Those things are just ugly, with a capital ug.” Kylie shuddered.

  Ash continued, her gaze assessing her lover’s reactions in his expressions and body language. He had done well during the fight, but he seemed tense and restless now. “They belong to an entirely different class of creature, one with barely a spark of the power possessed by one such as the Shadow. That was a Demon, one who passed through the hellmouth in order to enter this plane.”

  Drum’s eyes widened. “A Demon? But I thought all of the Demons you were supposed to fight had names and were all, you know, somewhere else. As in, not here. Not even within shouting distance of this island.”