Neither did Nicholas. Her mouth rose to his, and when she kissed him, Nicholas knew he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until she kissed him again.
But it wouldn’t be now. And when she drew back, he let her go.
CHAPTER 15
The Guardians’ headquarters in San Francisco wasn’t quite the prison Ash had thought it would be. She’d immediately had free range within the facility—and within two weeks, had been allowed to take walks around the neighborhood, with either a Guardian or Sir Pup by her side.
Today, Ash had chosen Sir Pup. Appearing as happy-golucky as any other dog sitting beneath a café’s sidewalk table on a sunny spring day, he lay at her feet while she read and sipped her coffee. That appearance was deceiving. If Madelyn found her, tried to issue an order, the hellhound would shape-shift and bite off the demon’s head before the second word passed her lips.
If Madelyn found her here. Ash knew the Guardians didn’t think it was likely, or they’d never have let her outside. Except for changing between her demonic and natural forms, Ash would never be able to shape-shift. Lucifer’s symbols carved into her body prevented any other shifting, probably just for this reason: so she couldn’t hide from Madelyn. But stage makeup to cover her tattoos, scissors, brown hair dye, and a hat to shadow her features all worked well enough to keep attention away from her.
So did a Guardian named Radha, a master of illusion who was currently in London and posing as a tattooed, miraculously-returned-from-the-presumed-dead Rachel Boyle. The story the Guardians came up with had been easy to follow online, caught in sensationalized headlines: Owing to some still-unknown trauma, Rachel had lost her memory for three years, which she’d spent at Nightingale House until she’d finally remembered her past . . . tragically too late to be reunited with her parents.
All close enough to the truth to be verified, and the remainder vague enough to mystify or frustrate anyone who tried to dig deeper. After two months, the news had lost interest, police investigations into those still-missing three years between Rachel’s disappearance and Nightingale House were cooling down again, and Madelyn still hadn’t made a move against Radha—she hadn’t even made a psychic probe to confirm Rachel’s identity.
Madelyn would probably do so soon, however. Since Rachel’s tattooed face had first spread across the Internet and news feeds, other demons had come after Radha, all trying to prevent that spell from being cast and Lucifer’s early return. The Guardian had slain them all—and Ash had no doubt she’d be able to slay Madelyn, too.
Until then, Ash remained a brunette who couldn’t shape-shift, and who still couldn’t fly. But she was working hard on that, doing the one thing that had never occurred to her while she’d been jumping out of a tree: reading.
Flying, she discovered, truly was for the birds. Humansturned-Guardians—or halflings—didn’t have an instinctive ability, and they had to make up for that lack in knowledge and understanding. In two months, she’d read her way through books and scrolls detailing bat and Guardian wing anatomy, piloting manuals for small planes and fighter jets, and texts loaded with information about the effects of wind currents and altitude—all in the hopes that when she was finally in the air, some of that knowledge had soaked deep enough into her brain that she understood the adjustments that needed to be made, and why she might need to change the angle of her wing in order to stop herself from crashing into the ground.
But the rest was simply familiarity. Inside the Special Investigations warehouse, Ash wore her wings constantly, and now she could maneuver them as easily as arm or a leg. She could flap them, hard and fast enough that she hovered—wobbling but upright—a few feet above the floor. In the next week or two, she’d be teleported to a desert for her first trial flights, with a Guardian standing by to catch her if something went wrong.
Much better than falling out of trees . . . but she wished Nicholas could be with her.
And her feelings for him hadn’t faded.
She’d thought they would—or that they’d be replaced by some newer, fresher emotion. She liked several of the Guardians and vampires she’d met, but she hadn’t stopped loving Nicholas, wishing he were there, trying not to laugh. Several other people she’d met were undeniably attractive. Ash didn’t want them. When her body ached, her thoughts were only of Nicholas.
And she missed him. That was new, a longing that cut deeper with each passing day, instead of fading as it should have. Even her resentment had subsided, though it had burned hot when she’d first read through the reports Taylor had compiled on her parents’ murder. For days, she’d been glad to be rid of him, glad to be surrounded by Guardians who gave her any information she needed, especially when it mattered. But her resentment hadn’t been able to stand up against her understanding of him.
He’d been wrong to conceal Madelyn’s involvement. He’d sacrificed her need for revenge on the altar of his own. But she also understood that he hadn’t let himself believe in her need, or the grief that had driven it. He might have known it was real; he wouldn’t let himself believe it.
That had changed. Given the same choice now, he’d have told her. Ash believed that to the root of her soul . . . and that belief didn’t fade.
So she lived with a bone-deep ache that deepened with his absence, the hope that Madelyn would soon be slain—and the pleasure that the tiny contact she managed to have with him provided.
As promised, he hadn’t attempted to reach her since she’d left the cabin. Though reporters had tried to find him after Rachel’s reappearance had cleared him of suspicion in her murder, Nicholas hadn’t made any public statements. But with Rachel alive and her accounts unfrozen, the Guardians had managed to liquidate and launder most of her assets, spread them across five different identities, and transfer them to Ash. With the substantial amount in hand, she’d begun buying up shares and taking over two of Reticle’s outlying holdings—Ash’s way of saying Hello.
Even distracted by his search for Madelyn, he’d eventually see her activity or be alerted by his staff, and look hard at her. And though he might not recognize who lay at the other end, she looked forward to his countermove.
No, that wasn’t right. She looked forward to everything.
She loved the fighting practice, the unending fencing forms, and the continuous study of things she hadn’t forgotten but had simply never known before. On the night she’d met Nicholas and he’d aimed his crossbow at her chest, Ash hadn’t been certain whether she didn’t want to die because of some deep survival instinct or a true desire to be alive. Not now. She loved life—as much as she still loved him. Preferably, that life would eventually include him again. But if it couldn’t, she could at least be certain that she’d made the right choice by coming with the Guardians . . . because it meant she’d never have to choose between life or Nicholas.
A beep from her cell phone alarm warned that her time outside was up; if she didn’t return soon, the Guardians would come looking for her. With a great huff, Sir Pup climbed to his feet. Ash collected her books and tossed her uneaten sandwich to the grateful hellhound—who’d already enjoyed two under the table.
“Pig,” she said, and he grinned his doggy grin at her.
Her resentment against him had faded, too. And after she’d realized how smoothly Lilith and Hugh had manipulated her and Nicholas, it had taken longer to forgive them, but eventually that sense of anger and stupidity had gone, too.
Intentions mattered, and she understood why they’d pushed Nicholas away and brought her here: They simply couldn’t allow a Gate to open and for Lucifer and his demons to spill out into the world. Ash couldn’t feel the same urgency about the whole matter that they did, but she recognized the danger of thousands of demons, each pushing humans like Steve Johnson to their limits, and not enough Guardians to hold them in check.
The whole world would go mad. Ash preferred the world as it was.
Well, maybe it could be a little better—especially if Madelyn were dead. Especially if Ash or
Nicholas were the ones to slay her. But she’d settle for dead, and be happy no matter who did it.
A block away from the café, she vanished the books into her cache. Easy now, just as forming her clothes or her wings were. Her eyes rarely glowed unless she wanted them to, and her fangs appeared with a thought. The only difficulty she had wasn’t looking demonic, it was looking too much like herself—if she wasn’t careful, her hair reverted to blond and grew to the middle of her back again. The Guardians had stopped buying the brown dye by the box and ordered it by the carton, instead.
Another two blocks of run-down warehouses and apartments brought her to Special Investigations’ large fenced lot. The building didn’t look any different than the others in the neighborhood—deliberately, she was told. Demons preferred to be surrounded by money and luxury, so they wouldn’t come into this area unless necessary.
Ash didn’t care about luxury, though it was nice. She did like money, however, so she’d gotten the demon thing half right.
A four-inch-thick steel door provided the first line of defense for the warehouse. Rigged with enough electricity to fry anyone with an elevated temperature on the spot, she avoided electrocution by swiping her keycard. As soon as she and the hellhound passed through the entrance, Sir Pup doubled in size and his two other heads appeared, tongues lolling from each massive jaw. Though her psyche and emotions were already shielded from detection, now she blocked all emotions coming from others. The Guardians had been surprised that she’d walked through London absorbing all of those human feelings, but even though they’d taught her to block them, she liked to open herself during the visits to the café. People were too fascinating to shut them out.
But although the Guardians and vampires at SI were fascinating, she couldn’t bear to allow them to bombard her. Not anymore. It was all too painful.
From the first day, she’d sensed a tension hanging over the warehouse, related to the Guardians’ missing leader, Michael. They’d been focused, determined. Fear and anxiety lay beneath that determination, but it hadn’t been overwhelming.
Then, three weeks after Ash had arrived at the warehouse, she’d been training with the novices in the gymnasium when a thin, spidery woman had stumbled through the Gate in the hallway—the portal that led to Caelum, but that Ash couldn’t cross through or even sense. Bleeding from her head, the woman had fallen to the floor, her black dress billowing around her.
She’d looked at them, clearly dazed. “The whole of the Boreas shore has just crumbled into the sea. How very odd.”
Her words had sent the novices swarming through the Gate to see. Ash had been left to help the Guardian—Alice—to her feet, and to make certain that she made her way to the main offices without tumbling over.
Since then, reports of falling spires and collapsing arches had been delivered to SI with increasing regularity, and the Guardians’ growing terror and desperation pressed like a knife against Ash’s tongue. She couldn’t feel the desperation herself, but she understood theirs. Two enormous paintings of the realm hung in Lilith’s office, an unimaginably beautiful city of sparkling marble domes and columned temples, set against the bluest sky Ash had ever seen. She also understood that their horror didn’t just stem from the shattering of that beautiful realm, but that the destruction was connected to Michael, too—who was being tortured in the frozen field.
That horrified Ash. And though she’d gladly have given Lilith and Hugh information when they asked how Lucifer had brought her out of the frozen field, she had nothing to tell them. Ash simply didn’t know.
Now, with her mind blocked, she waited for the various scans—temperature, fingerprints, retinal—to finish confirming her identity before forming her wings and heading toward the gym. The offices were busy, as they always were, with voices coming from every side. She’d learned to push them into the background, and typically only noticed when someone spoke her name.
Today, it wasn’t her name that caught her attention, but a thread through the jumble of noise that made her breath stop, her heart pound.
—St. Croix attempted to contact her yesterday—
That was Taylor’s voice, but it wasn’t coming from the direction of the offices. Ash turned down the hallway to the tech room, where Taylor and Lilith stood behind a Guardian sitting at a long table topped by monitors and keyboards. Sir Pup trotted ahead to meet Lilith, who greeted him with a smile and a scratch at his ears.
At the computer, Jake glanced over at Ash. “You came back just in time. Whenever Lilith stands this close to me, I get the feeling that she’s going to start using me as her dog and rub my head, instead.”
“You wish, pup.”
“No, I don’t. I really, really don’t.” He put a protective hand over his shaved hair and edged away. “Sir Pup would probably bite my face off out of jealousy.”
Ash thought the laughing chuff from the hellhound sounded like agreement. Taylor’s lips curved faintly in response, but not enough that Ash considered it a smile. Of late, everything about the woman seemed faint, and though Ash couldn’t see any measurable physical change, the impression of Taylor’s fragility increased with every report of a cracked column and crumbling dome, as if she stood on the verge of collapsing herself.
From what Ash knew of Taylor, it wouldn’t happen. The former detective would continue standing upright through sheer will—and chase down demons while doing it. Hopefully, that demon would soon be the one Ash most wanted to die.
“Was that Madelyn you were speaking about?” When all three lifted their brows in unison, Ash clarified, “I heard Taylor say that Nicholas tried to contact someone. Me? Because if he was, then that wasn’t Nicholas. He wouldn’t risk me like that. It would have to be Madelyn, fishing.”
“It was St. Croix,” Lilith said. “But he was trying to reach Rosalia.”
The disappointment that slid across her chest didn’t make sense. It was best that he didn’t try to contact her. Still, Ash wished to hear the sound of his voice, the rough start of his laugh.
It wasn’t all disappointment, though. There was also relief. “So that means you know where he is, and that he’s okay.”
“He’s all right,” Jake said. “And we’ve had a rough idea of his whereabouts since he left the cabin.”
“Oh. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t think anyone would know.”
But no, that wasn’t precisely it. After all, the Guardians had found them at the cabin by sending Sir Pup after Nicholas’s scent trail, all the way from Minnesota. Their computer techs had unearthed texts sent to unregistered phones. So, yes, if they wanted to, they could track Nicholas.
Yet now that she thought about it, everyone had carefully avoided any mention of Nicholas at all—so she’d equated their silence on the topic with a lack of information, a sign that they’d had nothing to give. They’d offered everything else so readily, so why not—
Oh. Oh. All right, so her emotions had taken a dive as soon as she’d walked away from Nicholas, and she’d been crying when she’d been teleported away from the cabin. There might have been a bucket of tears. It might have been ugly. But when had Ash given them the impression that she was fragile? Screw that.
“I’d rather you didn’t conceal anything about him from me. I’d much rather know, no matter what it is.” A thought occurred to her, seized her chest. Why had he needed Rosalia? Had they concealed the truth of that from her, too? “Is he hurt?”
“No. He’s been busy.” Amusement sharpened Lilith’s features. “Looking for Madelyn, of course, but where he doesn’t find her, he’s doing a bit of cleaning along the way.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that he’s been searching for Madelyn for a while,” Jake said, “and while he did that, he must have come across other demons. Taking them out would have been pretty damn risky—the wrong bit of evidence, he doesn’t hide a body well enough—so he likely chose to keep on looking f
or Madelyn rather than heading for jail. Now, he’s going back and essentially tagging them and bagging them.”
Oh, God. “Isn’t that still risky?”
“Not so much when he’s got Rosalia on speed dial. He shoots them full of hellhound venom, calls her up, she comes and takes care of it. Three that way so far, but this last one, he couldn’t get ahold of her. So he finished slaying the demon himself.”
“Beheading,” Lilith said. “Effective. Then he finally got in touch with Rosalia, and she came to take care of it.”
A first kill. Demon or not, that couldn’t be easy. “How was he? All right?”
Taylor turned her back to the table, sat lightly against the edge. “Do you really think he’d let Rosalia know if he wasn’t?”
“No.” Ash would bet that he’d been all Stone Cold St. Croix. Maybe his therapist would hear what his response had been. She doubted anyone else would. “Why is he doing it, do you think? Why not just Madelyn?”
Had it become more important to him, seeing all demons destroyed for what they’d done—to prevent it from happening again? Or was there another reason?
“Why has he become a demon-bagging Batman?” Jake asked. “Speaking as a guy, I can give you three reasons right now. One: your hair. Two: your lips. Three: your tit—”
Too fast even for Ash to track, Sir Pup’s right head shot out and his jaws snapped an inch from Jake’s face. The Guardian’s eyes widened. Smashing his lips together, he glanced at Lilith. A five-dollar bill appeared in his hand.
Lilith took the money with a smile. “I think what Jake means to say is that St. Croix’s obviously crazy about you. Hugh told me all that stuff St. Croix said at the cabin about protecting you was true.”
Ash didn’t need Hugh to tell her that. “I know.”
“So, this is probably part of it. Maybe’s he’s practicing to take out Madelyn. Maybe he’s making certain that none of these demons come after you, like others have been going after Radha. Maybe he’s just making certain the other demons don’t kill Madelyn first—because if one did and we never found out about it, we’d never know whether we can let you go.”
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