by Mary Calmes
“What?”
“I have never seen my mother act like such a girl,” he told me, shock all over his face. “She’s a mother; she’s not supposed to do that.”
“Do what? Get flustered when a handsome man is in her house?”
“Yeah.” He was indignant. “What is that?”
I laughed, reached out, and put my hand on his cheek. He leaned into the caress.
“It’s weird,” he groused under his breath.
Marcus was his normal charming self, and after a few minutes, some of the other women—Dylan’s parents’ coworkers—were also hovering close to talk to him. When Lily blushed over a compliment he gave her, Dylan made a gagging noise in the back of his throat.
Watching him, how revolted he was, I was having the best day since I’d gotten there.
After brunch, Marcus insisted on cleaning up the dishes, and since not only was the man hot but also courteous and charming, Lily was basically attached to his hip. And the thing about the man was not that he was like Ryan or Leith or even Jackson—you didn’t immediately notice that he was beautiful. What you noticed was his height and his build, and then slowly you heard his voice, felt the presence of a man who could protect you, and finally realized that he was all you needed. It was my conclusion, and I had asked Joe if that was how it had been for him.
“No.” He had grinned at me. “I heard his laugh and had to have him.”
The laugh was good too.
“And I wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
My impression was that Joe always got what he wanted. The man was a force of nature.
When Marcus finally joined me on the back porch, I asked him if he was done flirting with all the women in the house.
“You’re funny.”
The sarcasm was not lost on me. “You know Joe would be jealous if he were here.”
The look I got made me spit out my water.
“Joseph is never jealous,” he assured me, looking around. “He knows… he’s it.”
I had no doubt about that.
“Where are my swords?” he asked me since I had been in charge of smuggling our weapons out of the house.
I tipped my head toward the edge of the porch beside the potted pine that the Shaws decorated as their outdoor Christmas tree.
Marcus retrieved both his swords and my one, passing me my scabbard as he attached his across his back. I noticed that even with that task done, he seemed distracted.
“What are you looking for?”
“Ry.”
“What?”
“Ryan was supposed to be here to… oh.”
I felt the icy wind then, the vortex of a warder, and if anyone had been outside to look, they would not have seen a barrier go up, but they would have felt it. If a warder traveled into a closed space, everything sealed. Every lock, every window would shut tight until the warder stepped from the wormhole and saw clearly where they were. In a wide open area, a barrier was raised until the warder could safely arrive, and as soon as he or she got their bearings, the barrier dissipated.
Marcus and I both watched as a very annoyed-looking Ryan Dean stepped from what looked like a funnel of wind completely untouched, as though he had just come from a photo shoot. Each and every artfully styled strand of hair was in place. The only odd thing about his appearance at all was the presence of the katana that he was holding.
“Where’s the house?” he barked, and Marcus as I heard the door slide open behind me.
“You don’t have to yell at me. I told you that Jackson could have come,” Marcus called back.
“Jackson already came once, and so did Leith, so you know it’s bullshit to ask them to come again! I’m here, let’s go already!”
“What’s wrong?” Dylan asked as he leaned in beside me. “Why’s Ryan mad?”
“Merry Christmas to you too, asshole!” I shouted before turning to look at Dylan, putting my hand in his hair and dragging it back from his face.
“Malic,” my boyfriend scolded gently as he chuckled, leaning into my caress like a big cat.
“Fuck you, Malic. I wanna go back to my new loft and be with my boyfriend and my family!”
“Ryan!” Dylan scolded my fellow warder.
I gave my attention back to the snarling, pissed-off man in the middle of the yard.
“I want to go home!” he snarled at me and Marcus.
It was Julian’s family. Ryan, just like every warder in the world, was an orphan. But the fact that he thought of them like his family… that was nice.
“Now!” he ordered us. “Julian’s mother and I are supposed to be cooking in two hours. Let’s go.”
“It’s not Malic’s fault!” Dylan defended me.
“I will kill you all if we don’t go already!”
“I’m coming too,” Dylan told him, shifting like he was going to walk down the stairs.
“The hell you are!” Ryan roared, pointing. “Demon hunting is no place for a hearth!”
“You took Julian with you,” Dylan volleyed back. “He told me!”
Before Ryan’s brain could explode, Marcus put a hand up for him and then turned to Dylan.
“Listen to me,” he said softly, other hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “When Ryan took Julian, that was him and Malic just patrolling, and even then it almost went bad. This is Malic’s first Christmas with your family, and it finally, now, took a turn for the better. Does killing their son seem like a good gift for your parents? Even putting their son in danger is not a good idea. Put yourself in Malic’s shoes, Dylan. What would you do if the roles were reversed?”
“I want to see Brad Darby get hit,” he told my friend. “He deserves it.”
“And I understand about revenge,” he assured Dylan. “Joe has a cousin, Kurt, who nearly drowned him when he was young, and after I met him, I was thinking that I would enjoy beating the crap out of him.”
“And? Did you?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t because it’s over and done. Joe lived, and Kurt knowing for the rest of his life what he did is revenge enough. He lost Joe as a person in his life that day, and in my estimation, that’s a real tragedy. For Brad there on the other side of your property, what he did was try and pay his debt to this demon, whatever that is, with Malic. Now, we don’t know yet what he paid the demon for, but we’ll find out. I assure you that whatever we find out, we’ll let you know, but all of us need all of our hearths safe at all times or we cease to be able to function.”
Dylan bit his bottom lip as he stared up into Marcus’s face.
“Please, honey, just stay here,” he said, his hand lifting to Dylan’s face. My boyfriend nodded fast, and I found that I could breathe again. Marcus gave him a final pat and then left him. I bent and kissed Dylan and told him to stay put. Dylan didn’t move, but I saw how tight he was holding onto the railing, his knuckles white as I descended the stairs after Marcus.
As soon as we stepped onto the grass, Ryan yelled at me for directions.
“It’s right there.” I pointed across the backyard to Brad Darby’s house. “God, you’re an ass!”
He whirled around and started charging over the lawn toward the fence that separated the Shaw property from Brad’s.
“You didn’t have to come at all,” I told Ryan when we caught up with him. “Marcus and I can handle this.”
“If it’s really a summoner demon, one warder has to guard the passage back, Malic, while the other two push through the barrier and face the demon.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I would never forgive myself if I let you or Marcus down,” he told me solemnly. “But that so doesn’t make me any less pissed that on Christmas Eve you are dealing with this bullshit and therefore so am I.”
“Ry—”
“It’s bullshit!” he growled, levitating over the fence instead of climbing or vaulting.
“Holy crap.” I looked at Marcus.
“I told you,” he said as he and I both jumped the fence. “He and Leit
h are powering up, and I gotta wonder for what.”
I chuckled. “What? You’re thinking that they’re getting stronger to fight some epic battle?”
“Could be.”
“You think maybe they’re just powering up because it’s time or because they can?”
“Nothing is ever that simple.”
And he was right.
We came around the side of Brad Darby’s porch, and I heard Ryan groan.
“What?”
He tipped his head at the large inflatable snowman. “It’s creepy.”
I turned to look. “You fight demons, and the snowman is creepy?”
“Yeah, it’s weird,” he said, stamping up the stairs before he pounded on the front door.
No answer.
He knocked again, and there was still no response even though we could hear a low wail coming from behind the door.
I was going to break it down, charge it and slam it under my weight and strength, but Ryan put both his hands up, and the door flew off its hinges.
“Shit,” I remarked. “That’s impressive.”
“Theatrics,” Marcus told me. “But I—oh crap.”
Moving forward, we all saw the hole at once. There, not ten feet from Brad Darby’s front door, was what looked like a funnel cloud sucking everything out of the room. It would have been funny seeing Brad, with his one good arm, and his fuck buddy holding onto the light fixtures hanging from the vaulted ceiling, but their faces were a study in terror. It was like the room had been tipped on its side so that the two men and the dog were above the twister, ready to be sucked down into it. I was mostly impressed by the dog, who was holding on with her teeth to the pant leg of Brad’s sweats, her jaw clamped down.
“Help us!” Brad’s friend cried.
“Help!” Brad screamed.
I found myself more irritated than anything else and amazed, as I often was, by what should not have been possible but was.
In theory, one room could not be the only one affected by a tornado. It was like the little girl’s room in the movie Poltergeist: just not possible. But in front of me, Brad and his date and his dog were all holding on for dear life so they wouldn’t get sucked into the void. It was just so strange even though I had been looking at the same kind of thing since I was sixteen years old.
Marcus spoke words in Latin, and all three of us took a step back at the same time.
The funnel collapsed and the area flipped back, but while it was in the process of righting itself, everything fell. It was like the room had been in the dryer. It had all been tumbled. It was not going to be ready for Brad’s family to visit; even the Christmas tree itself was a wash.
We walked into the room as the couch crushed the TV.
Marcus and Ryan both winced, and Brad and his friend started screaming.
“Looks like there was a rave in here.” Ryan smiled for the first time since he had arrived. He bent down to one knee as Rita bolted for him.
Dogs were funny; they were good and loyal until they understood in some epic way that you were not the alpha in their life anymore because you could not protect them. An alpha that could not be head of the pack was useless to them. Rita stood in the circle of Ryan’s arms, her nose under his chin, and trembled.
“You guys can kill a collector demon alone, right?” he asked.
“Now that I know what it is,” I said, gesturing around to indicate the room. “Now that I know it’s just a collector. Of course.”
A summoner demon would never have revealed itself with a display like the twister in the middle of Brad’s living room. Summoner demons dragged souls to hell, slowly made you insane, and fed off that emotion of the terrifying decay of a fraying mind. When you were completely gone, you were devoured by whatever creatures you were thrown to. A summoner demon was terrifying and required three warders to kill, as Ryan had said earlier. Marcus, Ryan, and I had killed many. But this was not that kind of demon, as evidenced by the hokey display from a low-budget horror flick. We were dealing with a collector, and that was all.
I felt stupid. “I can kill this myself,” I told Marcus. “I feel like an ass dragging you and Ry here for this.”
“No,” Ryan snapped. “You still need two, Malic. There should always be two warders, and if a collector gets the jump on you—”
“Like this one did by pulling you through a barrier and onto another plane,” Marcus said, “then it’s bad news. You never, ever, hunt alone.”
“Never,” Ryan echoed.
Marcus nodded.
“But since it’s a collector demon,” Ryan said, rising from the floor, Rita beside him, making sure he put no distance between them, “I’m going home.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” I asked the dog, who was obviously preparing to follow Ryan Dean to the ends of the earth. “You saw me first.”
Her head tipped sideways like she didn’t understand the question.
“You like pretty boys too, huh?” I teased her.
Her tail started wagging, but she didn’t move. My guess was that she wouldn’t ever be moving from the man’s side.
“I hope Julian likes dogs,” I told him.
“Julian likes all animals,” he said. “The man was raised on a farm, after all.”
“He was?”
Ryan nodded, his smile getting even bigger now that he was talking about his hearth.
“Who the fuck are you guys?” Brad’s friend roared.
We all looked over at him standing there, shivering, eyes glazed, staring.
“Ohmygod, what happened?” A woman had walked in through the open door, a man with her. He was holding her hand.
Ryan stepped sideways so that his back was to us and then opened his hand. She had startled him, and Ryan hated to ever be caught off guard. The front door lifted from where it had fallen and slammed into place. Everyone jumped except me, Marcus, and Rita. I understood then why the dog had chosen Ryan: she could tell who the strongest guy in the room was, and she wasn’t about to be wrong twice in choosing an alpha.
“Oh no,” the woman gasped, hand over her mouth. “Brad, what did you do?”
He moved quickly across the destruction that was now his living room and grabbed the woman with his one good arm. She was obviously his sister, as they looked so much alike. His hand on her arm, he looked down into her eyes.
“The demon gave me until midnight last night to find another sacrifice, or he was taking you away, Jo. I couldn’t let that happen. After all you’ve been through, after finally beating the cancer… I just… I didn’t know what to do.”
He bent his head forward, into her shoulder, and sobbed. She put her hand on the nape of his neck and gently stroked, crooning at the same time, promising him that everything would be all right.
“Hello.” Marcus’s deep baritone turned every eye on him. “The demon is just regrouping; he will be back in a moment, so before he gets here, I need to know if I’m feeding you to it”—he stared at Brad—“or if I’m going to save you.”
And of course he would save Brad—we were not in the practice of feeding humans to demons—but if they thought he would, that made for some intense conversation.
As it turned out, Joanna, Brad’s sister, had been diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer. They had done everything but had eventually turned to their aunt, their deceased mother’s sister, for help. She had performed a ritual and traded her life for Joanna’s. It was a selfless act, or so it seemed. Unfortunately, their aunt was a practitioner of dark magic and had just wanted to return to one of the planes of hell. Tricking a collector demon had been easy, but when he discovered the ruse, it had been hard to remedy. He wanted a human soul for curing Joanna, not a tainted creature who was no longer in possession of one.
The demon had returned to Brad and given him an ultimatum: Joanna could return to hell with him, Brad could, or a sacrifice could be presented to him. Brad had panicked because he loved his sister, but he was terrified of trading his life for hers, and then
he had thought about what was behind door number three.
“Okay.” I sighed. “At least I understand now.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his eyes raw with pain. “I didn’t know what to do, and I knew you’d come to help, and I preyed on your weakness… God, Malic, I’m so sorry.”
“You preyed on his bravery, on his goodness,” Marcus corrected him. “It’s not weak to want to help, to want to save people.”
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
Ryan scoffed. “You’re just sorry it didn’t work, but lucky for you it didn’t, or we would be here in a much different capacity.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. Malic’s here,” Ryan told him, turning toward the door, traipsing through the rubble. “And you have a small problem, not a big one. Oh, I’m taking your dog, by the way.”
“What?” Brad yelped.
“I’ll see you two at home,” Ryan yelled back to Marcus and me. “Jules and I will be at the hotel for New Year’s if I don’t see you before.”
It was funny, the confused look on Brad’s face as Ryan did the neat trick again and made the front door fly across Brad’s front yard. We all saw the funnel of wind that looked so different from the vortex the demon had raised: smaller, tighter, more directed.
Ryan stepped into it, turned, and called Rita. I would have thought she would hesitate—she was a dog, after all—but that was perhaps her greatest strength. She didn’t question. Ryan was her new alpha, so she charged after him. They disappeared a second later.
“Holy shit.” The man who had come in with Joanna was finally freaked out enough to speak. “What the fuck is going on?”
We all heard it then, the fluttering of wings before a flying beast about the size of a rhinoceros appeared out of thin air. It looked like a pterodactyl—its jaws were huge, and the high-pitched wail was deafening. Marcus and I both leaped back. The creature missed us both but turned fast, like a coiled snake, twisting around to strike at us a second time.
We had been fighting together so long, we were so synchronized, that the minute Marcus leaped into the air, I lunged forward with my spatha. The demon, pivoting away from me, was caught in Marcus’s descent, pinned to the varnished wooden floor of Brad’s living room by the twin hook swords my friend carried. I turned and brought the spatha down across its neck, cleanly severing the enormous head from the body. There was a geyser of blood that sprayed everything—me, the walls, the floor—before the ground began to shift under us.
