Demon Bound (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

How easy killing a Guardian would be. Even Michael, the most powerful of all the Guardians, would fall if a sword cleaved through his heart or his neck.

But although the methods by which Guardians could be killed were simple, accomplishing it was another matter entirely. The Guardians' strength, speed, and training enabled them to fight the demons and bloodthirsty nosferatu who preyed on humans; their Gifts could be employed as weapons or defense.

And slaying Michael would be more difficult than slaying any other Guardian. His Gift of teleportation allowed him to disappear before a blade could touch him. In his thousands of years, Michael had developed unmatched skill with his weapons, lightning reflexes, and great physical power. His heightened senses warned him of an enemy's approach.

He might not be so wary of an ally's approach, however. It was no surprise, then, that a demon had arranged for a Guardian to kill him.

But a Guardian worthy of her wings did not slay other Guardians.

Even if she was bound by a demon's bargain to do that very thing, a Guardian should not kill a fellow warrior. Even if it would save her soul from eternal, frozen torment, a Guardian should not cut the heart from the Doyen's chest and deliver it to his enemies.

And a Guardian should not imagine killing Michael whenever she was faced with him, whether in person . . . or while studying his carved granite features in the upper chambers of an abandoned desert temple.

Yet as Alice Grey traced her fingers over Michael's sculpted likeness, she could almost feel his heart, warm and bleeding in her hand. In the one hundred and twenty years since she'd been transformed into a Guardian, the image had become frighteningly easy to conjure.

Perhaps she'd never been worthy of her wings.

Alice dropped her hand away from Michael's stone chest and tried to ignore the tightening around her own heart. What a fool she was, to imagine freeing herself from the bargain she'd made. Even if she paid the price that Teqon had demanded, she would be neither safe nor saved. She would be a murderer.

And either way, she was damned.

But not yet. Not until she was dead—or Teqon was. Until then, there was hope.

It would not do, however, to think of how very little hope there was.

Seeking a distraction, Alice stepped back from the granite frieze, gaining a wider view of the sculpted panels so that she would not see
Michael
, but the story illustrated by the stone, in which he merely played a part.

When she'd found this temple, she'd been gripped by the same anticipation and excitement that had accompanied each of her discoveries. But aside from one—very large—difference, this temple did not tell her anything new.

Her battery-powered lantern illuminated the dozens of friezes that covered the walls of this enormous stone chamber, but every Guardian was familiar with the tale they told. At the far end was a panel representing the First Battle, with Lucifer leading his rebels against the angels loyal to Heaven.

Other scenes filled out the history—the transformation of rebel angels into demons and the descent into Hell. Here, and in every other temple Alice had found, scenes from the Second Battle were shown more often than any other. The frieze directly in front of her celebrated the moment Michael had slain the dragon. The artist had styled the Doyen's hair in classical Greek curls rather than shorn close to his scalp, but his hard features were unmistakable. Other panels depicted Michael and several companions, who must have been the first Guardians he'd transformed.

The sculpted pieces were a mystery, but only as to their creation. Though almost two decades had passed since she'd found the first temple, she still did not know who had built them.

And she could not account for the missing pieces of the timeline.

Alice glanced toward the early panels. One of those rebelling angels in the First Battle had become the demon known as Belial. Once Lucifer's lieutenant, he'd turned against the other demon, and had begun a campaign to take Lucifer's throne.

That much had been recorded in the Scrolls—but Alice did not know
when
Belial had turned against Lucifer. How she would have loved to put it all in order.

And there were other pieces that had not been mentioned in the Scrolls, pieces that she and other Guardians had not learned until the past year—such as the nephilim. There was no indication when Lucifer had created the strong race of demons whose purpose had been to assist him in enforcing the Rules. At some point, the nephilim had tried to overthrow Lucifer's throne. With the help of Belial and his armies, Lucifer had defeated the nephilim and imprisoned them in Hell—but Alice had no idea whether their insurgency had been before or after the Second Battle.

Some time after the nephilim's imprisonment, a prophecy had been delivered to Belial and his followers, assuring him that he would prevail over Lucifer after the nephilim were destroyed. Nothing in these friezes or the Scrolls said anything of that prophecy—not who had foreseen it, or any details regarding how Belial would triumph. Alice only knew of the prophecy because Belial's demons had revealed its existence to a fellow Guardian—but since she'd learned of it, she'd thought of little else.

Not now, though. Alice closed her eyes. Not now.

That hope was so very small, a thin thread in a fragile cloth. Tugging too often might unravel it all.

She took a long, steadying breath, and looked again at the sculpted wall. What else was missing?

Ah, yes. None of the friezes showed when—or how—Michael had lost the sword he'd used to slay the dragon.

The recovery of the powerful weapon from an English manor in the early nineteenth century was also missing from the history, but that omission was easier to explain: this temple had been abandoned more than two thousand years before the sword was found.

The hem of Alice's heavy woolen robes brushed the gleaming stone floor as she walked along the panels, studying the final scenes. Most depicted battles between Guardians and demons or Guardians and nosferatu. A few included Michael, but there were also other, unknown Guardians. The last was of a gathering in Caelum—hundreds of Guardians stood before Michael's temple. Behind them, the city rose in spires and domes; even in black granite, Caelum's beauty was breathtaking.

She'd sketched the panel, but her precise drawings could not convey the skill of these artists. How, she wondered, would they have sculpted the more recent events in Guardian history? Could they have expressed the emptiness of Caelum after the Ascension, when thousands of Guardians had moved on to their afterlife, leaving only a few dozen warriors and novices in the Guardian corps?

And was it possible to show Michael's victory two years before, when he'd won a wager with Lucifer—closing every Gate between Hell and Earth for five centuries, and locking all but a few hundred demons in that dark realm? A wager could not be sculpted; an invisible Gate couldn't, either.

Perhaps they would have only shown Michael being forced to give up his sword to Belial, who would use it in his war against Lucifer. That scene would appear to be a defeat—but Alice thought the loss was not so terrible, particularly if the demons in Hell completely slaughtered one another by the time the Gates were opened again.

Easier to sculpt would be the nephilim, who had been released from their prison. Unable to remain in corporeal form outside of Hell, the nephilim had possessed the bodies of humans who'd died, and whose souls had been bound for Hell. Now, the nephilim policed the demons remaining on Earth, enforcing the Rules—but they'd also begun slaughtering vampires in various cities around the world.

Those massacres would be all too easy to depict, Alice thought grimly. As was the Guardians' frustration that, so far, they'd only been able to prevent the slaughter in one city.

Demons, nosferatu, and now nephilim. The Guardians remaining after the Ascension had enough to fight.

They should not have to fear one of their own.

She was, Alice realized, looking at Michael again. She tore her gaze from his likeness—and felt the touch of a Gift, muffled by distance and stone.

A Guardian was outside the temple. Frowning, Alice reached out in an ever-widening circle with quick, light flicks of her own Gift.

She didn't get as far as the Guardian. Startled, she extinguished her lantern and listened. She could not hear anyone, but her Gift did not lie.

A Guardian was near . . . but he was not the only one.

 

Moments after terrifying himself with memories of blood-splattered foliage and a splintered bamboo cage, Jake Hawkins opened his eyes and realized he had no idea where the hell he'd teleported.

At least it wasn't
Hell
. Though chances were, he'd end up in that realm sooner or later. Until he got his Gift under control, only dumb luck prevented him from taking a swim in the Lake of Fire. Or worse, landing on a warmongering demon horde.

Backstroking through burning lava was a damn good alternative to being skewered by a thousand swords—or kept alive so the demons could play a gleeful game of Torture the Guardian.

Fun for everyone but him.

But his dumb luck had held for one more jump, and instead of screaming Below, Jake stood at the edge of a sheer cliff on the side of an arid, rock-studded mountain. A waxing crescent moon was setting behind the sand dunes on the horizon; early evening stars shot holes through the sky.

Not Hell, but he wasn't in Caelum, either—although the Guardian realm with its white marble and never-setting sun was almost as empty of people. No fires flickered in the foothills; no human odors floated in the air.

And there was no one to see Jake form his wings and step over the cliff.

Wind sifted through his white feathers, and Jake resisted the urge to look at his satellite positioning device. He'd been taking these unexpected jaunts since discovering his Gift; unfamiliar geography had become a challenge. If he used his GPS receiver to figure out his location, he'd failed.

But this place almost had him beat. The low-growing prickly scrub and the distant stretch of desert could be anywhere in North Africa or the Middle East. The recent sunset and mountain range narrowed it to Tunisia, Morocco, or Algeria; but as one of three Guardians who could teleport, Jake needed to learn how to identify a specific region within seconds.

He needed to be able to go where he intended, too.

A Gift ain't nothing but knowledge and willpower.
Drifter, his mentor, had tossed out that not-so-helpful advice ten minutes before when Jake had been trying to teleport from Drifter's home in Seattle to the Archives building in Caelum.

Jake shook his head, circled back toward the cliff. Ignorance wasn't his problem. He wasn't spineless, either. He'd known where Caelum was, and he'd wanted to visit the Archives—but he'd still had to scare himself shitless in order to make the jump.

He'd also been praying he wouldn't run into the Black Widow. An image of the archivist's cold, disapproving stare had filled his mind just before he'd teleported.

So he hadn't focused hard enough; his Gift had picked up on his reluctance and landed him here. Wherever here—

With a snap of his wings, he drew up vertical and stared at the wall of stone.

A temple had been carved into the face of the cliff.

And he was catching flies. Jake closed his mouth, vanished his wings. The drop and knee-jarring thud against the ground shook away the last of his surprise.

No way could something like this have remained undiscovered, not for the length of time the architecture suggested. The portico of columns was unmistakably Greek. The pediment and entablature recalled the Parthenon's—only lacking the ornamental sculptures.

The interior extended farther back into the mountain than even his Guardian sight could determine.

He'd seen rock-cut buildings before. Petra, in Jordan—though those were of sandstone. The Hindu caves at Ellora were granite, like this was; but they were far more ornate, and completely excavated from the surrounding mountainside.

With a quick mental touch, Jake pulled the GPS receiver from his hammerspace. Screw failure—and, for now, the Archives.

He was in Kebili, a sparsely populated governorate in south-western Tunisia. After marking the coordinates, Jake vanished the device back into his mental storage. He couldn't contain his awe and excitement as easily.

But only a fool rushed into something like this. He opened his psychic senses. Nothing. No unusual sounds, either. Insects, the small squeaking of a shrew or rodent, his own heartbeat.

A light wind lifted and skimmed over his head, carrying grains of sand that settled on his scalp, rasped against his jeans, gathered at the neckline of his T-shirt. Each particle irritated his heightened nerves, distracting him. He scrubbed his hand over his buzz cut, brushing out the worst of the grit.

The forward chamber was a tall stone box, and hadn't escaped the desert wind. Sand lay thick on the floor, shifting beneath his feet.

And his weren't the only feet to have crossed it, Jake realized. Several sets of human footprints led to—or from—the inner chambers. The impressions had sunk deep in the soft sand, leaving the edges indistinct and making it impossible to determine size and direction.

No human scent lingered in the air. Either the footprints were well over a week old . . . or a human hadn't made them.