Demon Marked tg-7

by Meljean Brook

  “No, Nicholas. You have to—”

  “Be quiet, halfling.” Madelyn regarded him through narrowed eyes. “In exchange for a kiss, you’d let her kill you?”

  “I’d let her kill me for less than that, but if I’m to die, I want the kiss.”

  “Why not ask to fuck her in the mud like a pig? I’d let you. I remember a time when it would have been fitting.”

  “I remember when I had a mother worthy of the name.”

  “Ah, yes.” Something in Madelyn’s eyes shifted. Nicholas recognized that look. He wouldn’t know if it was a lie or truth, but it would be designed to hurt him. “She was a lucky find—young, beautiful, and so unhappy. It’s always such a hassle to arrange for a death, but she walked to hers. That holiday in Brighton, Nicky, do you remember? One early morning I was strolling along the beach, and I saw her strolling into the sea. I watched her stroll farther and farther out . . . until it was done, and she began to float back in.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I? I still have her body in my cache. So fresh, so beautiful—and still dripping with seawater. I wondered, What could possess such a woman to walk into the ocean? So I followed her scent to your rented cottage, where both you and your father still lay sleeping, and found the note. She just couldn’t live with either of you anymore, Nicky.”

  No. A demon’s lies, piled on. Maybe his mother had accidentally drowned, and Madelyn had taken advantage. But the rest was simply too much.

  “Produce the note, then. Of course you vanished it into your cache. You wouldn’t have left any evidence where it could be found.”

  “I burned it.”

  Now that was a pathetic lie, and he let his disdain harden his face, his smile. “So I know the truth, then.”

  “What does it matter, anyway?” Madelyn hissed. “Do we have an agreement? You get one kiss—and you keep your hands out of your pockets while you do. She can’t touch you until the kiss is done, then you give her permission to do anything she likes without breaking the Rules. Then I’ll order her to kill you. And she will, with no more clarifications or delays. Is that understood, Ashmodei?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, and the despair and fear in the answer cut him deep. Already seeing herself in the frozen field. Thinking that he’d completely bungled the one chance they’d had.

  He crossed the distance to her, coming up against her hard enough to send her stumbling back. Catching her face between his hands, he moved with her—closer to Madelyn, who watched with a twisted smile.

  But for this moment, he would shove the demon from his mind. There was only Ash, looking up at him. There was only the trembling of her mouth, the desperation as her gaze searched his.

  “Believe in me,” he said softly.

  His lips caught hers as she nodded, and there was only her sweet heat, the softness of her mouth. Only her surprise when he could no longer remain gentle, but hard and demanding. Only the squish of mud as she fell back beneath the force of his kiss.

  Closer to Madelyn.

  He judged the distance between Ash and Madelyn. God, he’d have to be fast. Angling his head, he kissed her more deeply, forcing Ash into a half-turn. Any closer, and Madelyn might step away. It had to be now.

  But first, one more second with her. He gentled the kiss—he wanted her to remember him like this. Not pushing, not shoving her around, not using her . . . but this.

  He lifted his head, and smiled at her. “I think all the delaying worked, Ash, because here they come.”

  Ash’s brows pushed together in confusion, then her eyes flared with sudden hope. From the corner of his eye, he saw Madelyn’s swords appear. Saw her turn her back to them, searching the skies.

  He leapt.

  His chest slammed into Madelyn’s back, sent her stumbling forward. He hooked an arm around her neck. She froze.

  “Ash, kill—”

  His hand slapped over her mouth.

  His chest heaving, he waited, making certain. His hold was secure, standing behind her with his left forearm crushing her throat and his right hand over her mouth. She couldn’t shake him off without breaking the Rules. And as long as his hand prevented her from speaking, she couldn’t give Ash an order.

  Madelyn was caught.

  A harsh, disbelieving laugh boiled up from deep in his gut. God. After twenty fucking years, he had the demon right where he wanted her.

  He looked at Ash, laughed again. Shock, joy, and hatred aimed at Madelyn—they were a gorgeous mix. “Do you have a weapon?”

  Even as Ash shook her head, Madelyn’s swords vanished. Not taking any chances. And Nicholas couldn’t move his hand from her mouth, not even for a moment.

  He fought the sinking in his stomach. All right. He’d known this might happen. He’d kept the grenade for this reason, as a fail-safe to keep Madelyn in line. Now, they had to count on the Guardians. He’d wait here with Madelyn while Ash made a run for the nearest phone. It wouldn’t take long.

  “Ash, reach into my pocket, give me the grenade—”

  He broke off as a leathery membrane slithered against his chest. Madelyn’s wings formed, snapped wide—not hurting him, not trying to dislodge him, not breaking the Rules. Still, he didn’t like it.

  They flapped once, twice. Though Madelyn couldn’t speak, the intention was clear: She was going up, and Nicholas could hold on if he wanted to.

  Ash’s eyes widened. “Nicholas, let go. Let go now!”

  Not in a million fucking years. Not when her soul depended on Madelyn’s silence. He’d hang on even if the trip took him all the way to Hell.

  He felt Madelyn’s laugh against his hand—and his arm was almost yanked from the socket as she launched straight up. Ash’s scream of rage and fear followed them, ripping through the night, then drowned in the rush of air, the slap of wings. Madelyn dove. Nicholas’s weight shifted, almost broke his hold. Jesus. His right leg caught her waist, gave him another anchor. In his pocket, the hard bulge of the grenade dug into his thigh.

  The wind whipped her hair into his eyes, his face. He could barely see anything below, just darkness beneath them. Darkness . . . and a faint crimson glow. Ash, racing along the ground, tracking their flight.

  Madelyn laughed against his hand again. Calling in her swords, she dove—toward Ash. Oh, fuck no.

  Without hesitation, Nicholas tightened his hold on Madelyn’s mouth, his leg at her waist, and unhooked his arm from her throat. He shoved his hand into his pocket. Yanking the pin with his teeth, he released the safety lever. How many seconds? Three? The dark ground rushed toward them—and Ash was there, Ash with no weapons to defend herself against Madelyn’s swords.

  He wrapped his arm around Madelyn’s chest, shoved his fist against her heart.

  Two . . .

  At least it would be like this, knowing Ash was safe. That she had nothing left to fear. He wished he could have given her more.

  One . . .

  He hoped that crazy Guardian hadn’t given him a dud—

  The explosion burst through Ash’s head, an agonizing crack through her ears . . . and then only a faint, ringing silence. Her scream echoed in it, a silent eruption of pressure that squeezed her chest into nothing. She ran, but not fast enough to catch him.

  The impact into the ground vibrated against her feet. Nicholas, on top of Madelyn—maybe she’d broken his fall. Maybe her body had shielded his from the shrapnel. Maybe there was hope.

  But she couldn’t feel a heartbeat, and her scream echoed in the empty silence again when she separated him from the mess that had once been a demon. Hauling him to her chest, she tried to breathe life into him, only tasted blood and death.

  Oh, God. He should have let go.

  She couldn’t let him go. Even now, though someone was coming, a white light through the darkness. Probably humans, investigating the explosion. They could have Madelyn, wings and all, and the Guardians would cover up the truth somehow. She’d take Nicholas, and she’d . . .

  She didn’t
know. Nothing seemed to matter now.

  A touch at her shoulder. She could feel the vibration of a heartbeat now, though it wasn’t the one she wanted, the punctuated hum of a voice through the silence. The white light grew brighter, washing out the red glow cast over his skin.

  She looked up into Taylor’s horrified face. Taylor’s lips moved, and Ash realized the glow was coming from the Guardian, brighter now, impossible to look at.

  Ash only wanted to see Nicholas, anyway.

  Taylor sank to her heels on the opposite side of his body. She touched his forehead, and the light was everywhere except in the blackness of Taylor’s eyes. Her voice hummed again in the silence, and echoed in Ash’s head.

  Nicholas, you have given your life to save another’s, and so now you have a choice: Will you continue on to what awaits at Judgment, or will you serve as a Guardian?

  And impossibly, impossibly, though he had no breath to speak, no life to shape the words, his voice, his reply—

  I will serve.

  Taylor’s laugh came from nowhere, everywhere. Well, this is my first, so let’s hope I get this right. Ash, stand back.

  She did, not even moving but suddenly outside the light, looking into the blinding brightness, still holding Nicholas’s body to her chest. Her heart seemed filled to bursting, aching with joy that couldn’t have possibly come so close after the devastation, but she was overwhelmed with it, the highest up after the lowest down.

  He’d be a Guardian.

  She flattened her palm over his chest, waited for the beat of his heart. Oh, it was already there . . . so faint, almost undetectable. The light was growing dimmer, still so bright but no longer shining outward—it was being sucked into the blackness of Taylor’s eyes.

  Taylor’s lips formed another word, unmistakable: Michael. Then, Help.

  Nicholas’s body jerked. His eyes flew open, staring sightlessly into the sky, his mouth shaping into a soundless scream.

  And he vanished from her arms.

  CHAPTER 18

  After two weeks, he could finally walk.

  The pain still ate through to his bones, but Nicholas could stand without crumpling, move one foot in front of the other. Slowly, he made his way to the enormous marble slabs that served as the temple doors. He just had to pull them open, and he’d be in Caelum. Then there would be a Gate—somewhere—that would take him to Earth. A Gate that would take him to Ash.

  He just had to pull them open . . . but Nicholas didn’t yet know if he could do it.

  Strength wasn’t the problem. Earlier that day, he’d lifted with a single finger the red sofa on which he’d spent the past two weeks. But two weeks ago, he hadn’t even had two hands.

  The left had regrown into the shape of a hand, but was still fragile. His guts and ribs, shredded by shrapnel, had almost completely pieced together—by the second day, his lungs had mended enough that he could take a breath. Tendons and muscle worked as they should, but the shattered bones beneath were still laced with cracks. Pim, a novice Guardian with a healing Gift, had predicted a full recovery within one or two more days. Of course, she’d said that four days ago, too.

  Not completely healed, but he didn’t look like a horror show any longer. He could close his eyes without being bombarded by the screams inside his head, the torturous bite of ice. So it was time to go.

  He braced his feet and hauled back against the door. For a moment, a pain lancing through his ankle gave him visions of his leg snapping and folding over on itself inside his pajama pants. He was able to slowly open the door. Light poured into the temple, blinding him.

  Nicholas stepped out into a ruin. As far as he could see, columns lay like tossed matchsticks, domes had collapsed into piles of rubble. No single building stood intact, and the towers that were still upright appeared sheared apart, pointed like jagged teeth. Beyond them lay a brilliant blue sky that stung tears from Nicholas’s eyes.

  “Not much left, is there?”

  Because they never left him completely alone, helpless in a crumbling realm, Taylor sat on the temple’s marble steps. The sun glinted against the gold and copper in her hair, and sparked like fire. It was almost a relief to look away from her, to the soothing white of the broken city again.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to color in a little while. Too much at once is like a kaleidoscope jabbed into your brain. And then later comes the Enthrallment, where one color is so beautiful, you just want to stare at it for hours. Of course, sometimes it just takes a smell, or a sound. Sometimes it’s just a combination of everything.”

  “So that’s why I’m still here? To give me time to adjust?”

  “That, and your freak hand.” She said it like a joke that didn’t come out right, and finished with a grimace. “Sorry. It doesn’t look bad now anyway. Almost normal. Just—”

  “Weaker,” Nicholas said.

  “That’s all on me. When Michael transforms someone, he usually can’t heal them with his Gift—just like Pim couldn’t heal you—because most of the time, those wounds are somehow self-inflicted. But during the transformation, he’s altering those people anyway, so he alters the body so that it’s healed. I didn’t know how to do that. It never occurred to me to study anatomy or how to rebuild someone. I thought he’d always be there to give it to me.”

  “But instead, he’s like that.” Nicholas nodded toward the city. “Broken down.”

  “Yes,” she said, and when Nicholas turned to look at the temple behind them—still strong, still standing—Taylor added, “I think that one is me.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t crack while I was in there, then.” And because another pain shot through his ankle and up to his knee, he eased down on the step next to her. “Is she all right?”

  “You ask that every day.”

  “I wonder every second.”

  “Ah, well. She’s still not sure that we aren’t all just lying to her. After Khavi . . .” Taylor shook her head. “It could be argued that she left you alone to die. Or that she single-handedly arranged events so that every decision you, Ash, Lilith, and I made led to your becoming a Guardian. We don’t even know if the stuff about Ash being able to get Michael out of the field was true, or if that was just designed to put everything in motion. And I don’t know what we’re going to do when she comes waltzing back in, but you’re one of us now, and your input will have weight.”

  He didn’t care about that. Group decision making wasn’t his style. They could what they liked. He’d do as he liked . . . when he could.

  “Why am I not healing right?”

  “We’ve got theories. You want to hear them?”

  “Yes.”

  “One is that I fucked up the transformation.”

  “Did you?” If so, he could live with it. Some of it had obviously worked. He had strength. He could hear her heart beating. He could see a tiny fleck of quartz in a toppled marble column lying one hundred yards away. If he healed a little more slowly than most Guardians, then he’d just train hard enough, get so damn good with his weapons that he’d be hurt less, too. Hell, he’d do that even if he healed normally from this point forward.

  Either way, problem solved.

  “I think it went okay. Things only went bad when I tried to heal you. That’s when Michael came in, and that didn’t exactly go so well. So, that’s the second theory—that the trauma of his mind slipping into yours was a shock to your whole system, and on top of the transformation . . .” She sighed. “Most Guardians are up and aware the second they are transformed. Me, I was in a coma for three months after he first got into my brain. You were only unconscious for about six hours, which might have just been the time your brain needed to heal, anyway. So you came through better than I did.”

  “Or maybe I came through better because you shielded my mind from his.”

  “I—” She looked at him in surprise. “That is kind of you, St. Croix.”

  “I’m healing and vulnerable. It probably won’t happen
often.”

  Taylor laughed, and Nicholas bore the pang against his heart, the longing for the laugh he most wanted to hear. God, he missed Ash.

  “Any third theories?” Anything to get him back to Earth more quickly.

  “Two more, and both of them a bit more mental than physical.” When he frowned at her, she said, “It matters, you know—the way a person perceives himself. Like, I’ve heard there were some novices who literally fell apart when they tried to shape-shift, because they couldn’t hold an image of themselves in their mind. Then there’s someone like Drifter, who can barely hold any shape other than his own, because his image of himself is so fixed. The funny thing about Drifter, though, is that last year, he had his leg bitten off by a dragon. Gulp! and everything from the thigh down was gone. That should have taken him a month to regenerate. He was walking around in two weeks.”

  Nicholas had to laugh. “So you think I’m not sure of myself? That I don’t know myself? I should introduce you to my therapist.” A thought occurred to him. “Where, by the way, you might find Khavi.”

  “But she’d know we were coming and skip her appointment that day.”

  “That’s . . .” Nicholas trailed off, frowning. He didn’t know what to call it. Difficult didn’t seem to cover it.

  Taylor nodded, as if reading his expression. “Now try a year of that.”

  “I will be, apparently.”

  “Yeah.” Taylor abruptly sobered, and looked out over the city. “Which brings me to the fourth and final theory: You don’t give a shit about being a Guardian.”

  “I don’t give a shit about a lot of things.”

  “I know. You don’t let anything get in your way when you want something. Death almost put a big fucking obstacle in there, but it just so happened that the one thing in the world you care about needed saving, and so you got another chance. You lucked out.”

  Nicholas had nothing to say. He couldn’t argue that.

  “I know you have Ash. That’s a pretty damn good reason to want to come back, to want to live. But it has nothing to do with being a Guardian. And I know what it’s like not to want the transformation, but taking it anyway, because someone’s counting on you, or you just don’t want to die. Those are all good reasons for saying yes to the transformation. But to keep going? It’s not enough. Take it from someone who has a Godknows-how-many-thousand-year-old guy hanging out in her head—it’s simply not enough to serve as a Guardian just so that you can do something else, so that you can keep hanging in there until the world falls into the sun. You have to make being a Guardian serve you.”