Guardian (Hidden Book 6)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “You may as well be,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You have Artemis’ blood. You’ve had Mollis’ blood. You have been healed by Asclepias. At this point, I do not think you will age.”

  “They made me immortal?” he asked, his eyes widening as he looked at me.

  “Close enough that there is not much difference, I believe,” I said.

  He furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  I nodded. “Back to what you were saying before? About everything the immortals have seen?”

  “Right,” he said, picking up his train of thought. “So I’m part of that world, the immortals, but I don’t understand a damn thing about it, you know? I don’t know who any of these people are, or what their relationships are, or… anything.”

  “It is a whole new world for you, isn’t it?” I asked gently, and he nodded.

  I smiled. “We are quite the pair, you and I,” I said with a small laugh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have no idea how to be an immortal. And I have no idea how to live among humans. We are lost, cub.”

  He gave a short laugh. “We are, Tink.” His eyes met mine, and the warmth in his gaze made something inside me twist. “We can stumble along together, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” I said, barely able to find my voice.

  He rolled over, onto his stomach, and I lay down on my stomach beside him, pulled the laptop over so we could both see it. I hit play with a sigh, and the four human women on screen continued the argument they were having.

  “Fine. But tomorrow night, we’re watching something else,” he murmured beside me.

  “We will see.”

  We watched a few episodes, and I looked over at him when I heard him start snoring. I closed the laptop, rested my head on my arms, and watched him sleep until I drifted off as well.

  Chapter Eight

  When I woke the next morning, Brennan was gone. There was a note beside me on the bed, that he was having coffee with another of his contacts in Ireland about some information that had come to light overnight and that he would see me later. Of course, he reminded me to be careful. He added a postscript to his note: “Tonight, we’re watching The Avengers. Or Iron Man. I’ll even let you pick. —B”

  I shook my head and got up, still holding his note. Really, I should take him back to Detroit immediately. I had the distinct feeling that the moment I set eyes on him, that resolution would go out the window. Unless I found my next two souls before then. Once they were found, we had to return to Detroit. He had work to do, and so did I.

  I showered, dressed, and checked my daggers. That done, I focused on rematerializing.

  I knew my next target was in the small tourist town of Kenmare, in the southern part of Ireland, so I rematerialized just outside of town. It was one of the most beautiful places I could imagine. Mountains rose in the distance, and the town itself was a mix of tall, narrow buildings, cobblestone streets, and an almost endless parade of tour buses. That part was new, I thought as I walked into town. The last time I’d been there, horses and carriages had traveled the streets. Aside from that, it felt the same. It looked the same, a church spire rising into the sky against a backdrop of verdant hills.

  It was mid-morning, and the main road through town bustled with activity. People walked to and from shops, and, while there was not an abundance of car traffic, there were plenty of people on bikes zipping along the narrow avenue. I snaked off of the main street, onto some of the nearby, less-traveled streets. Inns, pubs, shops, and the occasional inn filled both sides of the street. I kept walking, hoping to pick up an energy signature. My next target, Mary Shanahan, had died in this part of Kenmare, burned by her own husband and four neighbors under suspicion of having been possessed by a demon. There had been a trial and a whole lot of speculation at the time, and the husband had been found guilty of manslaughter. He’d deserved much worse.

  She did not belong on my list. Every other of the twenty-seven had been murderers, rapists, degenerates of the worst sort. Mary was nothing more than a woman who’d been killed after falling ill. It seemed to me that her only mistake had been marrying a superstitious fool.

  As I walked, my phone started vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Mollis’s number on the screen. I hit the talk button with a grimace. The telephone was among my least favorite modern inventions.

  “Hey E. Thanks for finding that soul. My mother is punishing him now and I feel dirty just from looking into his mind.”

  “I do not doubt it. He was a vile one. And you are welcome. I am on the trail of my next Irish target. We should be back in Detroit tomorrow or the day after, hopefully.”

  “Perfect. I swear these missing souls are making me nuts. Every one of them is like having my fingernails pulled out repeatedly. And it’s making Nether nuts…” she trailed off, and I did not know what to say. I felt badly for her. Her situation was much more difficult than her father’s had been. She was trying to work with ancient systems in a new world, a new reality, and she had been thrown into her role without even knowing it was coming.

  “I will find them as quickly as I can. I promise you,” I said.

  “My mother and aunt have been at those two you’ve brought in already. I even went to work on the butcher, trying to get them to tell us how they got out. Nothing yet, but I swear I’m going to break them.”

  A sense of foreboding filled me at the tone of her voice. “Mollis, you do realize it’s entirely possible they can’t tell you, yes? Your mother mentioned a blank spot in their psyches.”

  “I can break through whatever anyone else did to them. It’s amazing how quickly unbreakable things break once the pain starts,” she said, and the words sent a chill down my spine.

  “Just keep it in mind, or you are going to get even more frustrated.”

  “Right,” she said, and I knew Mollis’s “whatever” tone well enough to know she wasn’t going to change her stance on this.

  “Violence only excites Nether,” I reminded her gently.

  “Maybe. But it also makes me feel a hell of a lot better. Just find the souls, E. I’ll talk to you when you get back.” And with that, she hung up and I was left staring at my phone.

  I hoped the demon was watching her carefully. Nether’s influence wasn’t something to take lightly.

  And if it wasn’t Nether’s influence, then it was possible my friend was beginning to some of the humanity that had set her above all other immortals. The powers that had come with her new role as Lady of the Dead were ones I would not wish on my worst enemy. The ability to see every bad thing, every questionable thought anyone had ever had would be a waking nightmare. I remembered Hades’s coolness well, the way he held himself away from others. It was, I now knew, for his own sanity. But that separation had made him generally unable to empathize with others, unwilling to justify himself or his actions to anyone else. He’d been a brutal, cold god because he’d had to be, and I hoped Mollis had it in her to hold on to what she had once been.

  I knew, however, that she practically craves violence and always has. I just hoped she would keep it under control, lest Nether gain a foothold.

  I walked along a quiet road on the outskirts of town. I could feel an energy signature. My lost soul had come this way recently. I pulled my Netherblade from my sheath and kept walking, listening, sensing. All of a sudden, I stopped dead in my tracks. A second energy signature had joined Mary’s. I closed my eyes, focused, taking a moment to analyze and identify it.

  Quinn Connolly. Dead nearly forty years, and most certainly not on my list.

  Which meant Mollis didn’t know he was dead. Which was absolutely something I’d never heard of before. How could the God of Death not know someone had died?

  I took a steadying breath. This was bad, to put it mildly. The way it was supposed to work, a mortal died, and the god or Goddess of Death immediately knew everything there was to know about the soul: who it was,
where it had lived, and every single deed it had done in its life. What it loved, and, more importantly, what it feared. At the moment of death, a soul belonged, completely, to Mollis. And because Mollis (and, before, Hades) knew everything there was to know about a soul, the Guardians knew things as well, our mental knowledge of the dead tied to theirs.

  But there was nothing here but a name and a general sense of how long it had been since he’d been among the living, and I only knew that from analyzing his energy trail.

  I kept walking, and on a field outside of town, I found the two souls. The female sat on a log, looking at the hills in the distance. The male paced several yards away. All at once, he stopped, turned, and his eyes rested on me.

  “She can see us,” he said in a deep voice, a warm Irish brogue. The woman, Mary, turned and studied me.

  “I suppose you’ve come to bring me back, then,” she said quietly, recognizing me for what I am. I took a few steps closer. Unlike the last two, Mary was still very much nothing more than a wisp of spirit. She would feel solid to me, of course, but she wasn’t in any condition to affect the living. The doctor and the butcher had both been almost inexplicably strong, well on their way to developing fully corporeal forms.

  It was another sign that Mary was different.

  “How did you get out?” I asked her quietly. I was aware of the brawny Irishman, Quinn, studying me closely. I would deal with him eventually. I needed to understand how he was possible.

  “Please believe me when I say it was never my intention,” Mary said, still sitting on the log. That is another thing the living don’t quite understand about the dead. They say, “well, they can’t pick things up and they can walk through walls, so why don’t they just fall down through floors and the earth and how can they even sit?” Hades once explained it best, when he said that the Earth is the creation of the gods, and as such has some of our power in it. Everything attached to the Earth itself gains a little bit of that, meaning that it spans both the living and spiritual realms. So the floor of a building holds some of that energy, as does anything sitting upon it, like a chair or a bed. However, should the spirit try to pick those things up, they would find themselves unable to as soon as the item broke its contact with the floor, and, therefore, with the Earth.

  It is also why, in their most desperate moments, mortals find contact with the earth so comforting.

  “It was not your intention,” I repeated, nodding. “I can believe that. You are unlike the rest of those that escaped.”

  She smiled a little. “You mean I am not a bloodthirsty raving lunatic? Yes, I would agree with that.” Her voice had a pleasant lilt to it. She had been in her late thirties when she’d died, back in the year 1803. She still wore a plain gray dress which went down to her ankles, and her dark hair was held back in a tight bun at the back of her head.

  I walked over to the log, watching Quinn out of the side of my eye as I did. He stood in the same spot, watching me, a confused look on his face. I sat on the log beside Mary. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Mary folded her hands in her lap. “One of them… one of the monsters who got out, had claimed me as his own. As a plaything,” she said, meeting my eyes briefly, making sure I understood what she meant.

  “I am sorry,” I said automatically.

  She shrugged. “It did not hurt as much as burning, I suppose. Though you may want to mention to whoever is in charge that separate facilities for men and women may help. Not all of us need quite that much punishment while we wait for our final judgment.” I nodded, and she continued. “At any rate, when they were freed, he dragged me with him. I broke away from him as soon as I possibly could, and returned home. I met this fellow on the way. He doesn’t say much, but it is nice to have someone who can hear me when I talk.”

  “Do you know who freed them? How?”

  She was studying me. “I wish I did. All I knew was that it looked as if several of them were being pulled by an invisible force, and I was grateful to see him going as well. It is just my luck that at the last moment, he decided to pull me with him.”

  “Who was he?”

  “His name was Bates Downing.”

  “American,” I said, and she nodded. “Serial murderer and rapist.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I will capture him again,” I promised her. “I know it does not undo the things he did to you.”

  “I hope he gets a little more punishment for it,” she said.

  “Oh, he will. His final judgment will take all of it into account.”

  She nodded, and we sat in silence for several moments.

  “What have you been doing since you have been free?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “At first, just trying to get back here. I just wanted to go home. And, since, I have mostly been avoiding the crows when they come to claim the dead. In some cases, I have tried to make sure the crows find the one who just died. There are some that surely need the punishment they have coming to them.”

  I looked up to see Quinn still watching me wordlessly.

  “He’s the reason I got into doing that. That is his thing. The crows don’t seem to bother with him at all, so he’s been leading the crows right to the new souls,” Mary said.

  “What are you?” I asked Quinn, shaken by the revelation.

  He shrugged. “Far as I know, I’m just a man. Ghost, more to the case,” he added, still watching me. “What are you?”

  “I am a Guardian. It is my duty to collect the souls of the dead and bring them for their final judgment and punishment.”

  “Then why the crows?” he asked.

  “Because there aren’t enough of my kind anymore. The crows have taken over the duties that were once ours.” I studied him, as he studied me. He was tall, broad, barrel-chested. He was built much like Hephaestus, huge and solid. Reddish-brown hair fell in unruly waves over his forehead and down his neck. His eyes were a shade of bluish-green that I often associated with people from the Emerald Isle, fringed with long dark lashes. He was fair of complexion, and he’d apparently had a bit of a five-o’clock shadow at the moment he’d died. He wore a plain white t-shirt and chinos, cut in a way that would have been typical of the 1960s or so. “Explain yourself, please,” I said to him.

  A slow smile spread over his lips. “I was just about to ask you the same thing, lass.”

  I shook my head. “This is very serious. Why is it my Lady of Death doesn’t know about you? If she did, I would be here for you as well, not just for her,” I said, gesturing to Mary.

  He shrugged. “You know as much as I do, then. I expected you to be less clueless.”

  I let out a short laugh. “Oh, if you only knew,” I said, and he laughed as well. I sobered. “Can you tell me your story?”

  He nodded, and sat on the ground where he’d been, a few feet away from where Mary and I sat.

  “I lived here,” he gestured to the deserted cottage across the field, “with my sister and her children. She was widowed, and I was in no hurry to start a family of my own. I was the family’s bachelor uncle, I suppose,” he said, and I nodded. I could only imagine how frustrating that must have been for any eligible women who knew him. He looked to have been possibly in his early thirties when he’d died. “At any rate, we had all settled in one night, and I woke to the sound of glass breaking somewhere downstairs. I slept in the attic,” he added in explanation, and I nodded. “I stumbled down the stairs, and there was a man there, a man my sister had refused after the death of her husband.” I felt my stomach tighten. I clenched my fists in my lap. He caught the motion, met my eyes for a moment. “He’d killed my nephews before I’d even heard him down there. I went after him. We fought, and I screamed for my sister to run, but she was of course hysterical over her sons. She charged him in a rage, and he stopped slashing at me with his knife. I bled, and tried to catch my breath, and watched as he stabbed my sister in the stomach.”

  His tone was flat, as was normal when someone was trying to rel
ate an emotional story without losing their composure. As he talked, it was as if I could read his past, the way I usually could with souls of the dead. It came a little at a time, instead of all at once the way it usually did, as if, by sharing part of himself with me, I was allowed to see more.

  “She fell,” he continued, eyes still on mine, “and I watched her fall as he stabbed me one more time. I wrestled him for his knife as I bled out, and finally hit home. He and I fell at the same time.”

  Mary was silent beside me, apparently hearing this story for the first time as well. Tears glistened in her eyes, and she sniffed a little, shaking her head.

  “Women who looked like you came. Were you one of them?”

  I shook my head. I had not been there.

  “They took the souls of my sister and her children, and, in the meantime, her murderer tried to run. I held on to his soul and refused to let go. They claimed him, took him away. It was as if they never saw me at all, and soon I was left alone here.”

  “I can see you. I wonder why they could not,” I said softly. “You are a mystery.”

  “As are you,” he said with a nod.

  We sat in silence for several long moments. A plan was beginning to develop in my mind. Mollis needed these souls found as quickly as possible. And this new development was something I most definitely needed to figure out.

  “Now that I have found you, it will be easy for me to trace you again,” I said. “I offer you a choice,” I said to Mary. “Would you prefer to take your place in the Nether, and face your final judgment now?”

  “Or?” she asked.

  “Or,” I said, not fully believing that I was doing it, “would you like to stay here and help me track down the soul of the one who hurt you?”

  She’d been fiddling with the ends of her sleeves, and she stilled. “You would allow me to do that?” she asked.

  I nodded. “If it is something you want to do, yes,” I said. It felt wrong to send her back now. Wrong to lock her away when she had been here, in the mortal realm, helping my Lady in her own way. I would have to try to find a way to explain it to Mollis. “He has likely fled to the U.S. I can take you there if that is what you want.”