Monsters, Book One: The Good, The Bad, The Cursed

by Heather Killough-Walden

  However, everything had a weakness. Sentinels had two. One, just like any mortal healer, their ability to heal was limited. They could only heal sudden wounds, damage taken by any unnatural means. Nature’s particularly cruel damages – such as disease and aging – they could not touch. Also, each time they appeared, a sentinel could heal one person, and one person only. This was beyond frustrating for Angel, but admittedly more so for Darius because she normally instructed her Sentinel to use that power on someone else, someone she was certain needed it more.

  And two, sentinels could only approach their wardens if they were called by them. Fortunately, this could even be a mental call; sentinels could hear their names spoken in the minds of their wardens from anywhere in any realm. It could also be a desperate call for assistance in general. But if they were not called in either of these ways, they could not appear and were prevented from aiding their warden in any manner.

  The moment Angel signed the papers making her a warden, she knew she had one of her own. But she never called out to him.

  The idea of someone watching over Angel frankly creeped her out. She had to admit that being stalked by a vampire probably had a lot to do with that, if not everything, and yeah maybe she should have taken Gabe’s advice and seen a warden-appointed therapist. But she’d always been stubborn first. Everything else second.

  So the first time Darius had appeared to her was by accident. She was carrying boxes up the stairs of her apartment, determined to make it up three flights of stairs in one trip. Always one trip, never two. She hated making several trips. It was a pet peeve.

  In her stubbornness, she’d piled the boxes too high. The top one slid sideways, she bent to keep it from going, and when she did she slipped on the marble step. Out of reflex she cried, “Oh shit, no! Help!”

  Darius was there in a flash, wrapping his strong arms tight around her waist to steady her on the stairs. But she’d still flipped out and decked him because her instincts kicked in before her memory. He took the blow expertly, his head snapping to the side but returning with an amused grin before her wide eyes.

  To her, Darius looked like a Greek god or perhaps Michelangelo’s David with slightly longer hair. He was beautiful; all sentinels were. They were perfectly symmetrical and technically flawless. Male or female, they were evenly proportioned, with strong, sculpted limbs and vividly colored eyes filled with a natural compassion and understanding.

  Like all sentinels, Darius was replete with muscles. He had soft light blond curls that literally made him look like an angel. Cupid, maybe. Or rather, Eros. Apparently he had a sentinel twin brother named Ashrim who behaved like Eros. Even though Angel had never met Ash, she’d admittedly spent many a guilty night trying not to imagine herself sandwiched between the twins. And failing. Those were good nights.

  Wardens were incapable of damaging sentinels, thank goodness. According to Darius, her violent reaction to his sudden appearance happened to a lot of sentinels the first time they met their charges. The beautiful man laughed it off, then insisted on healing her twisted ankle.

  She hadn’t even realized it was twisted until he mentioned it. That was another cool thing about sentinels. They always knew exactly what was wrong. It was also annoying, especially if you didn’t want their help.

  Now, Angel unlocked her Jeep, tossed the keys on the driver’s seat, and left the door open to lean against the side of the vehicle for a moment. She took a deep breath. The temperature tonight was nice, which it always was on San Francisco nights. There was a gentle breeze, and on it she caught the scents of coffee grounds, sourdough bread, and unfortunately garbage. City smells.

  But it was peaceful at the moment. There were no sirens, no one was yelling or busquing nearby, and she could even hear the water lapping against the pier across the street. The night was calm and empty.

  Not empty, Angel. I’m here.

  Angel froze. Her heart stopped, then re-started a second later with a vengeance, bruising itself against her ribcage. She exhaled shakily, lifting off the car to step forward, her wide eyes searching the area around her deep and slow.

  I wasn’t imagining it? Maybe she wasn’t going crazy. Maybe there was someone out there.

  Oh yes, came the reply.

  Chapter Eleven

  Angel’s heart pounded faster, and her guts twisted with primal fear. She spun, reached under the seat for her gun, and unholstered it with mad speed. Then she continued to turn in a slow, searching circle, holding the gun in both hands. She kept it pointed toward the ground, but she nudged the safety off and eased onto the trigger.

  In the back of her mind, there was a voice that spoke rationally to her. It told her that people who were going crazy were also convinced that they weren’t crazy.

  She licked her lips as her head began to ache. Damn it, she thought, still unable to see a single thing that was wrong with her surroundings. Her vision had adjusted to the relative darkness and she could see into the shadows beneath the trees, around the few other cars there, and into the alleys between buildings. She appeared to be alone.

  She waited for the voice to contradict her thoughts again, to give her proof that despite her warding against probes or mental influence, something out there had somehow managed to read her mind. She expected something like, “No, you’re never alone.” Or some equally creepy shit like that.

  But this time, there was no reply.

  She waited another thirty seconds. A full minute. Two minutes.

  Still there was no reply. And now the strange feelings that had come over her earlier were gone too. The chills, the sensation of being watched, the dizziness were all gone.

  Angel took a deep, shaky breath. She reholstered the gun and placed it back underneath her seat. Then she sighed, running an equally shaky hand through her hair. “Okay, it’s official,” she said, fully disheartened. “I’ve finally come unglued.”

  For half a second, she thought about calling Darius. But he couldn’t help her if she was nuts. No healer could fix what was wrong with Angel because it was too complicated and completely normal. It was the result of something that happened long ago. One would have to turn back time and change fate. Not even erasing her memories would work. In forgetting where a wound had come from, the scar always remained.

  In an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, the heroine and Gabrielle had painted the picture perfectly while resting on the shore of a lake.

  Xena said, “See how calm the surface of the water is. That was me once. And then....” She threw a stone into the lake and the water became troubled. “The water ripples and churns. That’s what I became.”

  Gabrielle pondered it, then said, “But if we sit here long enough, it will go back to being still again. You’ll go back to being calm.”

  “But the stone’s still under there,” Xena told her. “It’s now a part of the lake. It might look as it did before, but it’s forever changed.”

  That was what happened with mental trauma, and no amount of memory erasing could fix it. The neurons of fate had made their scarring journey, burning the pain into the mind like a brand.

  Also, there was always the chance Angel wasn’t crazy, and there was something out here with her after all. As a warden, she had to consider that. It would have been stupid not to.

  On that note, Angel got into her Jeep, locked the door, and prepared to reinforce the wards on the vehicle so she could drive safely home. She was half-way through the first extra layer of wards when her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket.

  She swore, pulled the phone out, and looked down at the message that flashed for a few seconds before it disappeared. It was from Gabriel. It was probably the message that had been sent to all clan members, the one Jake had replied to earlier.

  He’d waited a very long time before contacting her with it. Which meant this was something urgent and big and even though he’d probably wanted to avoid getting her involved, he no longer had any choice in the matter.

  The notification vanished
before she could read the entire message, so Angel swiped on her phone and opened it properly.

  All fields. Wall break from Unseelie Realm Prison. Terrors, cantorips escaped into mortal realm. Two or more Terrors in Manhattan area. Possible unidentified dangers. Dire were suspect at helm; stay alert. Meet in quadrant two ASAP.

  Angel gazed down at the message and took a deep breath. It’s about time, Gabe. Bizarrely, a feeling of tranquility stole over her. She almost laughed at that – her, feeling peaceful at the thought of a job that was possibly fatal. She was running a little low on energy, both physical and magical, after all.

  But mentally, the job was just what she needed right now. It was the perfect distraction. It was like she always said: Bullets and beer. Now was clearly not the time for beer.

  Chapter Twelve

  The sheer beauty of her combat was inspired. It almost looked choreographed, and if he hadn’t been able to smell the fear, the sweat and blood in the air around her and her companions, he might have believed it was exactly that. But as the seconds and minutes ticked by, he realized the reason it appeared so well-timed and precise was because Angela Clemens and her team were so well practiced at this point, they were able to tell what their enemy was going to do before they did it.

  It was a simple matter to meet someone’s movements half-way if you knew ahead of time what those movements were going to be. And the dance continued.

  There were more than two-dozen wardens spread throughout several acres of the redwood forest that night, their ranks filled by warriors from six different clans. They’d broken into teams of around eight to ten. Anyone and everyone who’d been available had apparently answered this call. Something had gone awry in the Unseelie Realm…. He could sense the shift. He knew there was an unbalance now. Part of that other world had leaked into this one.

  He knew the warden detectors could sense it as well. He watched them “feeling” what was nearby, and wondered how many different creatures they could detect. The only thing he was certain of was that they wouldn’t detect him.

  He was old. He was powerful. And he’d taken special precautions to remain physically and mentally anonymous in the fray of the battle around him. He’d come here to watch her. It was his sole purpose.

  She was a warrior in every sense of the word. And she was going to be his.

  *****

  “Get down!” Angel gave the warning a split second before pulling the trigger, having no choice but to shoot when she had. The bullet exploded from her barrel and sped through the night with careful aim, thank goodness, because the young warden she was trying to save was a hair too slow in responding. Caleb was unable to duck before the enemy behind him attacked.

  She was a good shot. Her bullet hit its mark and Caleb’s face was spared.

  But Angel had never before come up against anything like what she was facing that night. She’d been lucky so far in her warden career. In all fifteen years, she’d only had to fight two Terrors. Both had left her scarred, and neither had done what this one was doing. She didn’t even know if her bullets would do any good against it. If she ever got to it.

  She was too busy fighting off all of its help at the moment. The Terror was called the Terror for a reason. Its enigmatic form and function left wardens baffled and unprepared because they never knew what monster it was going to ultimately inhabit.

  And this Terror took the cake. The moment Caleb had sensed it was near, Angel had ordered her team to move in. Every warden was protected with the usual mind shields to keep the Terror from leveraging their fears. The team wasted no time hemming it in with anti-transportation magic, then prepped their weapons. But when they reached the center of the area where Caleb was positive the Terror was located, it was to find it empty.

  It took only seconds for the entire attack plan to be skewed. Some people lowered their weapons to look around in confusion. Others had sudden, uncertain feelings. A few wardens began bellowing in absolute, rampaging fear.

  The Terror had made it past their mental protections. Angel barely recognized this was the case and had no time to further process it, much less wonder how it was possible before her people were being attacked from all sides. This Terror had not only made it past their wards, it had people working for it. What Angel blithely called “minions.”

  All hell broke loose in the forest that night. Angel spent more time disarming fellow wardens and knocking them senseless to protect them than she did fighting off the werewolves the Terror was controlling. Werewolves were a favored victim for rogues since they were incredibly fast and strong, and wardens were less willing to kill them. Werewolves were rare, and most wardens knew one or two personally. They were the good guys. No one wanted to see them go extinct.

  It made Angel’s job exponentially more difficult.

  Getting to the Terror itself would have brought the entire fiasco to an end, but that was where things became terribly tricky. This monster had possessed the body of an insanely powerful creature, the clurican. The host was tricky, manipulative, composed of pure magic, and as it had decided to prove that night, it could not only vanish into thin air at will, it could delve into the minds of humans and animals far more easily than the Terror inhabiting it. No magic could keep its mind control at bay.

  The clurican was rather like an evil version of a leprechaun, though no one was stupid enough to say this out loud – because apparently the clurican could hear you talk about it anywhere in the realms, and they hated leprechauns. Contrary to myth, neither was short nor particularly fond of shamrocks or the color green, though one leprechaun Angel knew personally ran a bar called “Lucky’s” and flaunted both because he felt it was funny.

  The clurican always wore black from head to toe, and that same black was reflected in his eyes. Come to think of it, Angel had never come across a female clurican, just like she’d never come across a female Terror, though both did supposedly exist. A clurican’s main love was thievery. Anything beautiful was coveted by their kind. Unfortunately, the clurican they were facing off with in the forest that night was only interested in stealing one thing: lives.

  Angel watched the werewolf she’d shot flash back into human form with the bullet’s impact. She was lucky. The wolves in battle that night were proving too fast for wardens to take aim. When a shooter had to move that fast to meet their enemy, they relied more on their ability to keep the gun from kicking too much in their hands than actual aiming. But aiming definitely helped.

  Fortunately this one had been coming head-on for Caleb, so it was distracted when she’d shot it. A normal bullet would not have harmed such a beast. In fact, emptying an entire load into a werewolf sometimes failed to stop them. To make matters worse, they healed with alarming speed, usually within seconds.

  But these bullets were special of course, ironically warded with anti-magic. When they hit their mark, the werewolf would be trapped without its supernatural power for a short period of time and would remain human until the spell wore off. It evened the odds a little.

  Caleb nodded his thanks to her a split second before he turned and engaged the now-human but still strong werewolf in hand-to-hand combat.

  Angel’s attention was pulled from them almost at once by a low growl to her left. She instantly dropped into a roll to avoid the lunging attack of a wolf who flew right over her, then jumped back to her feet to continue running.

  She never wasted bullets. And yet, her current clip was almost out. There were just too many moving targets. She’d managed to send five back into human form, but eight rounds had missed their marks, and from the sound of things around her, other wardens were faring just as badly. All they could do was wear their body armor and continue to shoot their rounds at a high angle to ensure they didn’t accidentally hit one another in the mayhem and destruction of the night around them.

  Angel decided to change clips right now, even with the two shots remaining. As she ran, she reached inside her jacket pocket, pulled out one of two spare clips, and dis
carded the current clip with a press of the magazine release button. She let it drop; there was no time to do anything but run and reload. She felt the beast behind her, felt its hot breath bearing down on her, and spun and dropped to her knees just as it attacked a second time.

  The sound of her gun firing filled the night. It was met by similar retorts around the circumference of the area. And the fight dragged on.

  It was the better part of an hour from start to finish before the wardens in the forest that night managed to contain the immediate danger from the prison break. The prison for rogue supernaturals had been breached where it rested in the Unseelie Kingdom, and that created a potential problem for future escapes. But the Unseelie King and the Goblin King both made appearances at the end, and talk of moving the prison’s location to some place more secure – the Goblin Kingdom – ensued.

  Angel knew the job wasn’t completely over. More escapees, not to mention the boss at the head of this escape, were in other territories and would need to be brought in. But by and large – she felt better. By the time she was back at her apartment and hitting her shower, she felt like she’d actually accomplished something.

  It made her feel like she was important. Like she was worth something.

  And as her head hit the pillow, those thoughts accompanied her into the short period of sleep her job afforded.

  Somewhere nearby, a powerful gaze looked on, and a powerful mind listened. As the subject of its study drifted off to a fitful sleep, wicked sharp fangs exposed themselves in a secret smile. You have no idea just how important you are, Angel. Nor how much you’re worth….