Guardian (Hidden Book 6)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  I smiled. “Thank you. I honestly do not know if there will be much. I rather hope there isn’t, because that will mean our lost souls are still unable to cause any actual harm. But it has been a while, and I am not sure if they’ve been free long enough to start being able to manipulate their environment or not.”

  “You shouldn’t be doing this alone,” he said after a few moments.

  I laughed. “Shifter, I am thousands of years old and have dealt with the dead since the moment I came into being. This does not worry me.”

  “They’re serial murderers,” he said, exasperated.

  “And I cannot die,” I said, shrugging. Of course there were dangers, but he did not need to know that. “Unless Mollis decides to end me, but I find that rather unlikely.” My best friend was the only being capable of killing an immortal.

  “But you’re saying someone’s behind it. What if it’s another immortal? They can’t kill you and keep you dead, but they can kill you enough to have you end up trapped on the other side, like Zeus.”

  “You worry too much,” I said in irritation.

  “And you don’t worry enough,” he answered.

  “Will you be helping me find information, or not?” I asked, meeting his eyes. He looked away, still annoyed.

  “I’ll help. You know I will.”

  “Without being moody and over-protective,” I added.

  He gave me an incredulous look. “I’m never like that.”

  I didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “All right. Sometimes I am. I will try not to be. Okay?”

  I smiled. “Thank you.” I have known his grandmother, Artemis, long enough to know that, like her, Brennan did not mean to be annoying when he went into protective mode. It was the way they were, the way, essentially, all shifters were. It had something to do with instincts and pack alliance and things I did not really understand. Artemis had tried to explain it to me once by asking if I had ever seen a mother wolf when her pups were threatened somehow. I’d nodded, and she had explained that that was what it was, except it was not just their own family they cared for. It was anyone they cared about, anyone they had, in one way or another, started thinking of as “theirs.” It meant that, to have a shifter, or even more, one of Artemis’s line, as an ally, meant knowing that someone was looking out for you.

  Which was nice, but ultimately unnecessary for someone like me.

  “If you need more help than that, you’ll ask though, right?”

  I finished my tea, stood up and patted his shoulder. “If I need anything else, you will be the first one I ask.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I am going to get some sleep now. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “Be careful.”

  I patted his shoulder again. “I promise I will be.”

  I washed my cup and saucer and headed up the stairs, giving him a wave as I did. He just shook his head.

  I smiled to myself. I had just saved myself weeks of trying to find out who knew what. If anyone knew anything, he was the man who would be able to ascertain how much information we really had.

  After a few hours of fitful sleep, I woke, packed the small black duffel bag with the few things I’d need, and focused. My first target had died just outside of Paris. And that was where I would begin my search.

  Chapter Four

  For all its modernity — the newer-model cars that filled it streets, the modern style of clothing — I still saw Paris as it had been long ago. The clomping of horse hooves on cobblestone streets, the flurry of women in their flowing empire-waist dresses, the sounds of haggling surrounding me in its many small marketplaces.

  I sat at a bistro table at a cafe near one such market, cafe au lait warming my hands as I took in the scenery around me. Cars rumbled by intermittently on the narrow street, and men and women bustled past, on their way to one of the many shops and bistros nearby. In the distance, I could hear the bells ringing at Notre Dame cathedral, and they sounded just as they had the last time I had visited Paris, nearly one hundred years ago.

  So much the same, and yet, so very different.

  Old cities had that in common, I’d found. I could see the way they had been, beneath all the layers of modern life. Still the same, but different. And I mourned for what was lost, perhaps more than I’d ever mourned a death, I mourned the beauty the world had lost, even as it gained beauty in other ways.

  Hephaestus would laugh at me, I realized as I took a sip of my coffee. He, who was so completely enamored with every new thing humanity came up with, while I longed for the days of horses and carriages. Plays instead of television, letters instead of email. The fashion was so much better then, I thought, glancing at a young woman wearing neon orange sneakers.

  “Good Hades, you really are a cranky old woman,” a wry voice said to my left.

  “Megaera,” I said, greeting the Fury as she sat down in the chair opposite me. She was one of the very few people in existence who could pick up my thoughts when I wasn’t specifically trying to shield them. “Did she send you to check on me?”

  She smiled. Megaera, like her sister Tisiphone and her niece, Mollis, had flowing waves of nearly-black hair, skin so pale she could have been one of the marble sculptures in the Louvre, and eyes that usually glowed white. Today, she’d enchanted herself to at least have normal looking eyes. She was improving in that regard. Sometimes, we forgot to make concessions to the mortals. I was relieved she had remembered this time.

  “She did not. I needed to get out of the Netherwoods for a while, and she mentioned you’d be around here, most likely. Any luck?”

  I shook my head, frustrated. I’d spent the last two days looking for any sign whatsoever of my current lost soul, with not even a trace.

  “Which one is this? There were a few from France, from what I remember,” Megaera said as she waved down a waiter and pointed to my coffee, ordering one for herself. Of course, I would end up being the one to actually pay for it, I thought with some amusement. She still hadn’t really grasped the whole concept of paying for things that the mortals held so dear.

  “Do you remember ‘the Vampire of Paris’?” I asked. We stopped talking as the waiter brought Megaera her drink, as well as another for me. I watched him as he walked away, out of earshot.

  “Oh, yes. That was a mess,” Megaera said with a grimace. “It was around fifty, right?”

  “Fifty-seven victims,” I said, nodding.

  “Not an actual vampire, though,” Megaera said, sipping her coffee.

  “No. Honestly, calling that one a vampire is an insult to some vampires we know.”

  Megaera nodded. “He was a monster.”

  The infamous ‘Vampire of Paris’ had been nothing more than a middle-aged human male who, after catching his wife with her lover one evening, killed her and her lover, and then went on a rampage in the late 1800s, killing nearly sixty women over the course of five years. One per month, on the same day each month, until he was caught and executed.

  “The vampire name was catchy, though,” Megaera said, and I shook my head. “Though no actual vampire would even bother biting the ear. So many better body parts to feed from. That’s just stupid.”

  “It was the draining in addition to the bites, of course,” I said.

  “Well yes there is that. Creepy bastard,” Megaera replied. “Where will you check next?”

  I’d checked the usual places for souls to return to: the place he’d died (via hanging, messy business), the place he’d committed his crimes, which was the same home he’d shared with his wife. Still there, still occupied, but very much only by the living. I visited his grave, which was marked with a very small granite stone, as if he’d been given the barest amount of recognition in death. Even that was more than he deserved. He hadn’t been in any of those places, and, part of what I, as a Guardian, can do, is pick up the energy signature left behind by a soul, even after it’s left a place. I can track the energy signature, follow it, until I�
�m able to capture it and take it to the Nether.

  Unfortunately, the energy signatures fade over time. If he had been in any of those places, it was quite a while ago.

  I pushed the irritation away, that if someone had told me this sooner, maybe his energy signature still would have been fresh enough to track. What was done was done, though, and I would just have to search harder.

  “He was employed at a slaughterhouse not too far from here.”

  Megaera made a face. “You think he would return there, of all places?”

  I shrugged. “It is as possible as any other place. Reports from the time indicate that he murdered the women with knives he’d pilfered from his workplace. I read an article that said that, after his capture, he joked that the only thing his knives had ever been used for were slaughtering cows, of both the human and bovine variety.”

  “If only we could kill him all over again,” Megaera said with a snarl. I shook my head. Furies. That blood lust, that streak of violence was always there, just below the surface. How often had I seen it in Mollis, just waiting, barely constrained, ready to explode at any moment? Tisiphone was no less violent, but a bit better at concealing it than her daughter and sister seemed to be.

  I stood up, and she followed. I paid for our coffees, left a tip for the waiter. Megaera watched the entire process as if it was some grand performance.

  “Did you plan on coming with me?” I asked as we walked, the shadows from the buildings shading the sidewalk on our side of the busy street.

  “Would you mind if I did?”

  “Not at all,” I said, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my leather jacket, all the while wishing she would return home.

  Megaera laughed. “You Guardians. You do know there is no point in your subservience now, don’t you? You’re not under anyone’s thumb anymore. Not Hermes’, not Hades’. Mollis wouldn’t even consider treating you as a servant.”

  “I have never considered myself subservient,” I said quietly.

  Megaera was quiet, and I was aware of her watching me. “But you were. All of you. You did every single thing Hermes asked of you, and, even after he transferred command of the Guardians to Hades, you all continued on the same way.”

  “We were not all apparently working in Hades’ best interests,” I said, reminding her of my sisters’ betrayal. They’d turned on Hades and his family, choosing to follow our old commander, Hermes, when he’d decided to go after Hades’ daughter. They had not told me about any of it. I still failed to understand why, but I was grateful to have been left out of it all.

  “But always more than willing to be ordered around,” Megaera pointed out. I rolled my head a little, stretching my neck, a very human action that I found made me feel better, especially when I became irritated. “They stopped listening to Hades, but they listened to Hermes. And you just kept listening to Hades, and, now, Molly.”

  “I don’t listen to anyone,” I said, looking ahead. “I do things that must be done. If it soothes the occasional ego to believe they have me under their boot, it matters not at all to me. If I am underestimated because I am seen as nothing more than someone’s errand girl, all the better.” I turned my head, studied Megaera. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. The only opinion that matters is my own, and I am at peace with how I handle my life.”

  “Right. That’s why you went away for two years,” Megaera murmured.

  I didn’t answer at first. “You are just as old as I am. Those years are nothing.”

  “They are to those who have lived their lives as human. To Molly, it seemed to be a very long time. And you knew that. And you’re missing the point.”

  “Here is a question,” I said. “Of the two of us, which is still doing the same thing she’s done every single day since coming into existence, and which has found herself in a whole new reality?” I watched her, and she gave me an irritated look. “You speak of things like subservience and never changing, yet you are the one who has had an easy transition.”

  “My sister betrayed us as well,” she reminded me. The third Fury, Alecto. Her name was no longer spoken.

  “I know. But you are not the last of your kind. You have your sister, your niece. You have whatever Mollis’ son will become. You are in a different place, but your life is largely the same, no?”

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “And you are grateful.”

  She nodded again.

  “Right. Now imagine if you were here, with none of your family with you. With your very reason for coming into existence at all, stripped from you. Think about that, and then you can lecture me about how I should have handled myself.”

  “I am sorry I have angered you, Eunomia,” Megaera said.

  “I do not get angry.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  We were nearing the abandoned slaughterhouse. We could have rematerialized there, but I wanted to walk. It was much easier to pick up the energy signature left by a soul that way.

  Unfortunately, it also meant I had Megaera’s company.

  “Why? So I can be like the rest of you?” I asked, glancing at Megaera again. “Running on rage all the time, ready to cause pain at the drop of a hat?”

  “No one could doubt that we are alive. That we feel, that we have emotions. You… I wonder sometimes if Nyx left something out when she created you.”

  “Yes. Stupidity. Go back to Mollis now,” I said, focusing, then rematerializing inside the slaughterhouse.

  Ah. There. My irritation with Megaera (who had always been the most annoying of the Furies) faded away as I picked up the faint, barely-there sensation of an energy signature. It felt like prickles along my skin, like a chill up my spine. I closed my eyes and let myself feel it, let myself decipher this particular signature.

  I have watched enough late night television now to know how often actors in crime dramas search for fingerprints. Energy signatures are my version of fingerprints. No two souls’ energy signatures are alike, and, much as I know exactly where to collect a soul of a person who has just died, I can identify which person’s energy signature I am feeling.

  I kept myself open, focusing on not losing the faint energy trail. This was my lost soul. This was Edouard Biset, “the Vampire of Paris.”

  He had been difficult to apprehend in the first place, and that had been with two of my sisters at my side. I was not particularly looking forward to facing him again. I followed the trail anyway.

  The old slaughterhouse was essentially one huge, cavernous room. The brick walls were slick with algae. Holes in the failing roof let in an almost useless amount of daylight. Not that light was necessary. I would see a soul even if I could see nothing else.

  Large iron hooks hung from heavy chains. Not many; there had likely been more once upon a time, but over the years, scrappers had taken what they could. Usually, all that was left in these old abandoned buildings were things that couldn’t be easily removed. There were several old wooden worktables around, and I hit my knee on one of them, not focusing on where I was stepping.

  The scent of death hung over the place like a veil. Old death, but death nonetheless. And Biset’s energy signature was getting stronger the deeper I followed it into the building.

  I went around a brick wall, into another area of the facility; this looked to be an area where the butchering had been done. Tattered, yellowed posters showing the various cuts of meat hung on the walls.

  He wasn’t there. I looked around in irritation. I’d almost missed it, but there was a door to the left. I slipped across the room and pulled it open.

  Hooks hung from the ceiling. A cooler. There was another doorway on the next wall, leading I guessed, to another cooler, and I opened it, stalked through.

  “You again, eh?” a high, reedy voice said, and I spun. He’d somehow circled behind me, and now stood in the doorway I’d just stepped through. “It is convenient, being able to walk through walls,” he said in French.

  I slid the tiny dagger I
had concealed in my sleeve down into my palm and sprung at the soul. He dodged, cackling wildly, and circled around me again, swinging out and punching. He caught me just under the jaw, and my teeth clicked painfully together.

  I forced myself to focus, trying to get in close, trying to angle in with my dagger.

  A dagger seems like a useless thing to use against a soul. The goal, of course, isn’t to make them bleed. The daggers I use, the daggers every one of the Guardians used, are honed from almost glass-like black stone from Tartarus itself. They were honed and fashioned by Hephaestus, blessed by Hades. The moment a soul gets stabbed or cut by one of the blades, they weaken. They slow. They lose their ability to walk through walls or slip away easily.

  The crows that have since taken over our jobs, those created by Nyx Herself, are a special strain. Their beaks have the same properties as our blades. Of course, most souls are ready to go and don’t fight back. I wondered what one of the crows would have done in my place as I received another bone-rattling punch to the side of my face.

  He was talking the entire time, raging. Mostly about how he was forced to do it, how if the women hadn’t been evil, he never would have killed them.

  I didn’t answer. Arguing with deranged souls is about as useful as arguing with someone after they have had a few too many drinks. They’re unlikely to make any sense, and you just end up looking foolish. I focused, instead, on trying to get my dagger into him. Unfortunately, this was not his first confrontation with a Guardian, and he knew what to watch out for. He continued dancing away from the blade. He tried to head toward one of the walls to escape, and I ran at him, crashed into him, knocked him down and back onto the floor to prevent him from escaping. He called me many vile things as we scrambled around on the floor, though they sounded much nicer in French. I focused on trying to get my dagger into him.

  He surprised me by grabbing my dagger hand and suddenly shoving it toward my face. I turned my head away, and the dagger narrowly missed my eye, but I felt the razor-sharp blade draw down the side of my face, down to my neck.