Metal Guardian: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Rings of the Inconquo Book 2)

by A. L. Knorr

  All the way to the very steps before their feet the bolt’s fury lapped and Daria felt her skin sweat and prickle with the wave of heat. The furnace blast dried the tears on her cheeks and filled her mouth with the taste of ash.

  A hawkish man in resplendent red robes who had stood patiently waiting for his turn to meet the king staggered up the last few steps toward them. His robe smouldered, and blood ran freely from his hooked nose. Hands outstretched he collapsed before them. Ninurta gingerly pressed the corpse back down the steps, sending it tumbling into the pit.

  Daria looked up in horror at the face she’d adored seconds before and saw something more awful than she could have ever imagined. Not even in the presence of Lamashtu, the drinker of blood and the emptier of cradles, did she behold such utter, boundless evil.

  Ninurta studied her expression, and that sorrowful expression of loneliness crossed his features.

  “Again and again. None seem to understand.” He took her chin and drew her face to behold the carnage below. “What are the lives of a few men when I seek to free Man?”

  Chapter One

  I almost didn’t make it in time.

  The oil on the skillet had been hissing at me for long enough, too long really, but I was busy trying to give Jackie instructions concerning the basbousa.

  “You need to let the syrup soak into the cake before putting on the second layer,” I’d been saying before a soft crackle told me I had seconds before scorching another sheet of kisra.

  Turning smartly, I scuttled to the electric griddle and used a small paddle to scrape the edges up before peeling the thin sheet of sorghum flatbread up in one stroke. Mindful of the hot sheen of oil clinging to the surface, I laid it out on the cooling rack. I frowned at the deeper brown colour of the sheet, more than one shade further from the golden hue I was going for, but I couldn’t be too picky. The stack of charred sheets in the rubbish bin was nearly as big as the stack beside the griddle.

  Jackie had followed me into the kitchen, looking over her sinewy shoulder at the living room she’d spent the last hour and a half cleaning and primping.

  “Let it soak and then put on a light layer,” she said with a nod. “Right, but where’d you put the syrup?”

  “It’s on the stovetop.” I ladled out more batter for the next sheet of kisra intending to keep a sharp eye on it. “Slice a diamond pattern across it as soon as it comes out and then put the syrup on. Do it all while it’s warm; otherwise, it won’t soak properly. I put the instructions on the fridge.”

  Jackie, my best friend and roommate for the past year, stuck out her lip in a mock pout as she took the one step required to reach the refrigerator and the recipe I’d scribbled across the memo board there.

  “It’s almost like you don’t trust me, luv.” She crossed her arms. “You think I’ve never baked a cake before?”

  I freed another sheet from the griddle and smiled at its golden finish before turning to Jackie, my expression flat as the kisra.

  “The closest you’ve ever gotten to baking anything is watching The Great British Bake Off.”

  For a second, the pout melted into a quivering expression of utter hurt, and I felt a tug of guilt. But the pained look vanished in a twinkle of milk chocolate eyes, and she grinned with childish mirth.

  “Had you going!” She giggled and danced away as I flicked a dob of batter at her. “Oi! Not on my nice clothes. Wouldn’t want Uncle Iry thinking I’m a slob.”

  Uncle Irshad was finally coming to live with us. Not for the first time this week the thought overwhelmed me with a giddy kind of shock. I bounced a little on the balls of my feet.

  “As if,” I snorted as I scraped up and ladled out the very last of the batter. “You’ve been called many things, Jackie, some of them by me, but slob isn’t one of them.”

  “Maybe, but my wardrobe is a lot more limited lately,” she huffed, tugging at the front of her blouse. “This is about all that fits me anymore.”

  I spared a second from watching the flatbread cook to give my friend a once over.

  It is amazing how slow and subtle changes can creep up on you. Jackie was still a tall, gorgeous young woman, the type that turns heads yet remains blissfully ignorant of how beautiful she is, but she’d added a stone of weight to her frame. And that stone was nothing but pure, bone-breaking muscle. In the space of a year, she’d gone from party-hopping knockout to amazon queen, and the difference was impressive. Her arms and legs corded with sinew, her shoulders distinct, ridges of muscle rippled down her stomach––she was strong enough to squat the back end of a lorry.

  The transformation was amazing, but I felt a stab of guilt thinking about why it had been necessary.

  “We’ll have to go shopping soon, both of us,” I muttered, trying to keep emotion from thickening my words. I turned back to my kisra as my vision began to blur. Uncle Iry’s impending arrival had me in a bit of an emotional state, but the memories of last year rolled in like a freight train.

  Both our lives had been upended when I discovered that I was part of a bloodline of mystic guardians who traced their heritage all the way back to ancient Sumer. The Inconquo had learned the secrets of shaping and controlling metal with their minds, and for millennia they were humanity’s first line of defense against horrible beings that threatened to wipe civilization off the map. With the discovery of some rings while interning at the British Museum and a whirlwind meeting with a professorial ghost who became my mentor, I became absorbed in this world in a matter of days. Things only got more complicated when I realized that my best friend was in a relationship with a man who wanted to unleash the type of monstrosity that I, as an Inconquo, was duty-bound to stop.

  Somewhere between multiple attempts on my life, some sleuthing, being rescued by my ghost mentor’s demonic ex-lover, and a showdown with the bad guys in an industrial ruin, Jackie had been dragged into the middle of the chaos thanks to one man: Dillon Sark.

  Needless to say, all of this had some serious psychological effects on both of us, especially knowing that Sark, though badly beaten, had escaped and was still at large.

  It was a point of frustration and shame that kept me up some nights, wondering what rock he’d crawled beneath. But for Jackie, it was like the trauma awoke an angry engine inside her. The bruises hadn’t even healed before she was on the hunt for training: gym memberships, self-defense classes, martial arts programs, survival skill exhibitions. If it focused the mind or hardened the body, she was there, putting in the time and the sweat. It was impressive enough to watch from the outside, but for me, it was downright surreal. Jackie didn’t sweat, didn’t strain, hell, didn’t work, because she didn’t have to. Beauty and well-to-do parents meant she didn’t need to. But when that illusion of security became stripped away, Jackie had found herself wanting.

  So she’d upended her life with me rather than trying to piece the broken bits back together. She left university, got a job at a department store, and followed a relentless training schedule. She was determined to become an independent woman and never be a victim again. She walked away from the partying, binge drinking, and the lads, her unholy trinity of weaknesses. In truth, her day-to-day life had changed much more than mine, and though she seemed happier and healthier for those changes, their catalyst didn’t sit right with me.

  How could I be happy for my friend’s new life when I knew it was trauma––trauma caused by my life and problems––that sparked the change?

  “You’re doing it again,” Jackie said at my shoulder.

  I jumped and looked up guiltily.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, but Jackie’s confused expression told me that perhaps my melancholy introspection wasn’t what she was talking about.

  She pointed at the griddle. “How about you peel up the bread before it burns.”

  I gave a little cry of dismay as I realized my distraction had almost cost me my last sheet of kisra. I eyed my stack as I turned off the griddle. It wasn’t as much as I’d planned to have, but
there were only going to be three of us. When making the Sudanese dishes, I tended to make too much. My mother always insisted, even on her and my father’s meagre incomes, that we prepare enough food to share with a guest or neighbour. Everyone in our building had tasted our food at least once.

  I slid the kisra laden plate into the warm oven, next to a pot of bamia tabiq I’d made earlier. My father, who was a finicky eater, often praised my mother’s bamia tabiq, a savory stew of okra, onion, and lamb with some tomato paste to help give it a vibrant orange-red colour, especially when he had kisra to dip in a piece at a time.

  When I’d asked Uncle Iry what he wanted for his first meal in the UK, he was singularly unhelpful.

  “Whatever you make will be fantastic, Ibby,” he told me, grinning from ear to ear. “I will just be glad to be with you.”

  So I figured his brother’s favorite dish was a good option. But, just in case he was not so inclined, I had a backup.

  Moving to the refrigerator, I lifted out bowls of lamb marinating in an oily sauce of bay leaves, coriander, black pepper, jalapeno, and garlic.

  “You didn’t tell me we were having shaiyah!” Jackie cried as she eyed the meat ravenously. Thanks to her fitness preoccupations, Jackie’s need for protein had turned her into quite the carnivore. I typically did the cooking, but the pan-fried meat was such a favorite that Jackie had learned to make it herself. Honestly, the last time I’d taken my life into my hands and snuck a few bites that she’d made, I thought hers was just as good as mine, maybe better.

  “Jackie, I need you to make the shaiyah, too.” I untied my apron strings with one hand, as I dabbed my face with a dishrag. I was officially running late.

  Jackie frowned, eyeing the bowl of meat on the kitchen counter balefully.

  She chewed her lip. “Ibby, I don’t know. What if I mess it up?”

  “You got this, babe.” I handed her the apron before she could protest further. “I’ve got to be at the gate when he gets off the plane.”

  Jackie was already tying the strings. “Just because your only living family is leaving his war-torn land to come live with us, you think you can dictate things to me? Cook this, bake that!”

  She looked at me, both of us smirking at how comically small the apron looked on her muscular form.

  “Only because you are the best friend a girl could hope for.”

  Jackie rolled her eyes and scooped up the bowl of marinated lamb.

  “Now flattery,” she groused with mock exasperation as she struck a sassy pose, finger-wagging. “I’m on to your game, missy!”

  “Nothing escapes you, Ms. Holmes,” I called over my shoulder. “Where did you put my purse?” I asked, looking at the coffee table Jackie had cleared in anticipation of Uncle Iry’s arrival.

  “Sorry, luv, I put it in the hallway, next to your stash table.”

  I looked down the narrow hall that lay off the living room toward the rear of the apartment. My “stash table” as Jackie had come to call it was a waist-high end table with a drawer where I kept a few pieces of bangled jewelry and four very special rings. Last year had taught me to always have them with me when I went out, but when I was home, I usually deposited them all there. I could see the table from every doorway. I saw my purse propped up against the table leg; the paper Uncle Iry would need for customs and immigration, as well as my own paperwork, was jutting out of the thin, fraying leather.

  Because Uncle Iry was coming to the UK on a ‘family reunification’ visa, I had obtained a special pass to get through security and meet him before customs.

  I opened my mind, just a little, to the chorus of metallic auras, which had become an everyday part of my life.

  I’d learned to keep calls of metal in the background, a kind of layered white noise. With some practice I’d learned the texture of different metals so that, without much effort, I could draw out the strand of a specific metal from the ambient humming. The more exposure I had to the metal, the smoother the transition.

  The rings and bangles in the drawer I knew well. A gentle push had them sliding the drawer open without dumping the whole thing on the floor. That level of control had taken time and practice. When it came to moving metal, my will still tended to be more of a blunt instrument than a fine scalpel, but I’d been practicing. No use lifting a car off a person if I was merely going to send it tumbling onto another poor fellow nearby.

  With another thought, the rings and bangles rose up and down to scoop up my purse. Their cargo secured, I held out my arms and drew them all to me––soaring through the air like a cricket ball. The rings, which I’d separated again after last year’s experiences, found their well-worn spots. Two slid onto my fingers while the other two joined the links of a necklace I always wore. The bangles hauled the purse up to my shoulder. Momentum had it slap against my hip, but I was already turning toward the door, unphased. As an afterthought, I sent the bangles slithering down from the purse strap to cup my wrists.

  It had taken a few seconds, and while it was marginally faster than hustling down the hall to grab everything, it was an easy way to build practice into my day.

  After all, with Uncle Iry living with us, I wasn’t going to be as casual with my power as I could be with Jackie. He still had no idea what had happened last year, and for his sake, I was hoping to keep it that way.

  “I’m off,” I called and left the flat to make my family whole again.

  Chapter Two

  The hour-long trip from Covent Garden to Heathrow was uneventful except for a growing sense of agitation. My legs bounced as I sat on the train. I must have looked ridiculous: dressed nicely, hair done up like a woman heading to a date or nice party, but squirming and fidgeting like a bored grade-schooler. I had plenty of time to make a fool of myself, but also enough time to introspect.

  I was going to get my father’s brother, as far as I knew my last living relative. I suppose that as an Inconquo, an ancient bloodline of warrior-mystics, I had other, distant relations, but Uncle Iry was the only one I knew and who knew me.

  But did he know me?

  The question struck me hard enough to still my bouncing feet.

  Did he really?

  My parents left Sudan before I was born, using money that my uncle and father had pooled from working in an automotive garage together. The unrest in Sudan had driven Iry out of Nyal, and it was years before he and my father were back in touch. I was five or six the first time I heard his voice, and it wasn’t until I was a teenager that my parents ceased monitoring my communications. They let me use the internet on my own, but I could only chat with people they knew and trusted. That limited it to three friends from school, my kickboxing instructor, and Uncle Iry. Due to his late-night availability, he was the only one to talk to online when I was feeling restless, which was a common thing for me at that point in my life. From there, it grew into a real relationship, and after my parents died, he became an ocean of sanity and stability in my storm-tossed world. But always through a computer or a phone, and from thousands of miles away.

  Now, up close and personal, would he even like me?

  My heart beat faster, and my fidgeting started again, as I kept thinking of all the reasons he might be disappointed––or even resentful. Wasn’t I the reason my parents had left Sudan? That meant I was the one who’d not just taken his life savings, but, more importantly, his brother. I was the reason Iry never got a chance to see his brother in person again, never had a chance to say goodbye. And since my parents’ death, as much as he said he loved talking to me, I knew that I’d leaned on him more than he on me. He was the one loving me, carrying me through it all with his regular calls, no matter what they cost him. I was mourning the death of my parents, who I’d spent the last two decades with, while Uncle Iry had to bear the grief of twenty years away from those he loved and the certainty that he would never see them. He didn’t even get the chance to speak the Janazah before his brother was taken to the grave. By the time I could get in touch with him, Moth
er and Father were already buried.

  He’d given so much, even as so much was taken from him, how could he not be angry? I was sure once he saw the luxury and comfort Jackie and I lived in, he would be disgusted. Even bringing him here to the UK, more of the money had come from what he’d earned working for Greater Nile than what I’d scrounged together with my internship. Once again, Iry sacrificed all that he had for his family, and I benefitted.

  With these thoughts running laps around my head, I was an absolute wreck by the time we pulled into Heathrow station. I tried to tell myself that I was being silly, but it was no use. As I climbed onto the platform, I was practically trembling under the weight of my guilt and self-loathing.

  Only the conviction that not showing up to meet him would deepen my insurmountable debt kept me putting one foot in front of another. The perpetual crowded bustle of Heathrow helped, the press of people didn’t give me a chance to break down or turn back.

  Moving on auto-pilot with the crowd helped me calm down a little, at least enough to confirm which terminal I was going to. I’d been planning this for months, and if you’d have woken me up in the middle of the night last night, I could have recited them to you on the spot, but not now. After my destabilizing trip here, I was having trouble even remembering what airline he was coming in on.

  I finally found the displays, and after one panicked moment, I remembered the flight plan.

  He would probably be exhausted, and even if all my anxiety was nonsense, I could hardly expect him to be cheerful. If he were not the grinning, gracious Iry I’d come to expect on my computer screen, then I just needed to brace myself for whatever happened. As I found his flight and gate number, I began to wonder if I’d been categorically stupid for insisting a welcome feast after such a draining day of travel.

  Something snagged my eye before I turned to head for the gate.

  A shabby-looking man was leaning against the far wall, his eyes fixed on my face. His clothes were rumpled, and the way he held his body seemed awkward. His face was gaunt and unshaven, but his dark eyes stabbed at me with something like hatred. The furious glare was what had drawn my gaze, something familiar about its intensity, but no sooner had I taken notice than my line of sight was broken by passing travelers.