Guardian Demon (GUARDIAN SERIES) (20 page)

“Nabi.”

“What? That’s not a color. It’s not even a word.”

“Not in English. It is Sumerian for the shade of blue that appears when the sun shines through a cresting wave.”

“Bullshit.”

“No. That color is called
hammur
.”

Was this real or was he just teasing her? His grin hadn’t faded. Taylor forced herself to stop staring at it. She liked the look of his mouth too well.

Firming her resolve, she tried again. “What do I look like? All in English.”

“There are too many colors in your hair to name now, but the most prominent shade resembles the orange within the dancing flames of a gingko wood fire. It is interwoven with the same red as the volcanic stone on the cliffs of Lanzarote.”

What? She opened her mouth to stop him, but he was already continuing.

“When your eyes are closed and the sun is directly overhead, your lashes shadow the uppermost freckle on your right cheekbone, and forty-six more are sprinkled across your cheeks and nose. The seam of your lips is the same length as your smallest finger. In your bare feet, you stand as tall as the point of my shoulder. When I place my hand on your lower back and the tips of my fingers are in the curve of your waist, the width of my palm spans three vertebrae. When you are calm, you inhale every eight seconds and your heart beats every two seconds. But both are faster now.”

His lashes brushed her palm. He’d opened his eyes. His smile had flattened into a grim line.

Taylor didn’t know what to say. She dropped her hand and stared at him. He looked at her with eyes of pure obsidian. No shine, no reflection in that all that black. Just darkness.

God. Her heart
was
racing. “What was that?”

His big palm cupped her jaw. Warm, strong. His thumb whispered over her bottom lip. “I always notice that which makes me vulnerable.”

A shiver ripped through her. The dragon had known what made him vulnerable, too. “And do you want to destroy me for it?”

His fingers tightened. “No. I would protect you as I would my own throat. Except that I would let my throat be slit before I’d allow harm to come to you.”

Pretty, pretty words. Why did she want to believe them? Hadn’t she learned?

She’d seen what was in him. She had to remember that.

“But I’m not a throat. I’m not part of you.” She grabbed his wrist, dragged his hand away from her cheek. Cold air rushed in like a slap. “And I don’t have eight thousand years under my belt, but I have enough experience to know that there’s not much difference between protecting someone and destroying them when it’s done without their permission. When it becomes smothering.”

“Yes. But I will protect you, regardless. I cannot stop.” His hand twisted and caught her wrist before she could turn away. She tugged and slipped on wet shingles. Without rising from his crouch, he snagged his arm around her waist and dragged her onto his lap, her back to his chest, her ass nestled against his groin.

She froze.

His heat surrounded her. His voice was a soothing harmony in her ear. “I would not hurt you, Andromeda. I would not smother you.”

“Yeah. I’ll trust that.”

“It’s true.”

“Because you only want to please me? Right.” Her sarcastic laugh started from deep in her chest and hurt coming up. Her ass was right over his cock. She could feel him against her, one hell of a package, but unlike every other part of him, his penis wasn’t hard. Hard muscles, hard expressions, hard heart. Yet not a thing was happening down below, even though her legs straddled his thighs and her every movement rubbed against him. Even though her own arousal wound through her body, hot and insidious and completely unwelcome. “What the fuck is this stupid seduction really about?”

His arm tightened around her waist. “I want to know more of you.”

“A year in my head wasn’t enough?” She gritted her teeth. “Is this because of what Khavi said? Are you worried that I’m secretly crying over losing your love and that a pity fuck will make it all better?”

“No. You have asked me why—and that is why. I want to know everything about you. That is why my every glance measures your face, why I record your every expression. Why I listen to you breathe. But there is so much more to know. How you would move beneath me. The sounds you would make, your taste.” He buried his face in her hair. A bleak note in his voice reverberated through her chest, made her throat ache. “But above all, I want to give you pleasure instead of the pain I already have—and I know that sex is the only thing I could give that you might enjoy. It is all that I have to tempt you with.”

So not even a pity fuck. A guilt fuck.

No, worse than a guilt fuck, because he wouldn’t even get any pleasure out of it for himself. He’d be humping a body that didn’t arouse him. And since his cock hadn’t even hardened, he’d apparently thrown out the filling-her-with-seed idea, too. Not that she wanted that. But Michael obviously didn’t want anything from her, either, except for Taylor to make him feel a little less shitty about everything he’d done in Hell.

“Just don’t get your hopes up,” she said and hated the painful rasp in her voice. Hated how much it probably told him. “In a few weeks, I won’t see you again.”

“I know,” he said roughly. “That is why, even though important matters demand our attention, I speak of it now.”

“Well, I’m done talking. And considering that Mark Brandt is dead, he’s one important matter who gets more priority than you do. So it would please me very fucking much if we could get off this roof and do our jobs.”

She felt Michael’s inhalation against her hair, his slow nod. “We will go to Alejandro, then.”

Teleporting again. She prepared for the dizziness, forced herself to ignore every inch of her body against his. Just a few weeks. They’d find this demon and vampire, fix Caelum, then she was done. She just had to keep her mess of a head together for a few weeks.

Not long at all.

Though he hated to let her go, Michael briefly left Andromeda on the roof and teleported to Alejandro’s location. If Alejandro was meeting with officials, Michael would return to Seattle and wait.

Alejandro was alone. In an office, walking toward an open door. One small window, several possible weapons on the desk.

The other Guardian sensed his presence. Pivoting, he kicked the door closed and materialized a sword in one smooth movement. The weapon vanished when he met Michael’s eyes.

“Irena needs to accompany me to a meeting,” Alejandro said in Spanish. “You will not be able to anchor to her. She is not shielded, but she hunts nosferatu.”

Alejandro’s psyche touched his. Michael opened his shields. The image of a cave appeared in his mind, with a mouth barely large enough to crawl through.

Of course she would have gone in after it. Michael would choose an easier way. “I’ll return with her.”

He teleported back to Seattle and found Andromeda still crouched on the roof, her eyes closed and her face lifted to the sky. Her cheeks and lashes were wet.

Agony seized his chest. In the next moment he realized that they were raindrops, not tears. But the ache didn’t fade, leaving him raw and exposed.

She feared that he would destroy her? If she wanted to, Andromeda could destroy him before the dissonance did. Her every look and every word were swords against which he had no defense. Michael had never been as vulnerable as when he was with her.

But he didn’t want to be anywhere else. Even when he bore the brunt of her anger and distrust, when her tongue slashed through his gut like a burning blade. Even when moisture on her face shredded the surface of his heart. That pleasure, that pain—he would take it all with him.

Michael only wished that he had time to gather more. Hours ago, he’d rejoiced when Khavi had given him a few weeks. But that was no time at all.

He knew so much of her—and as with every human, there was so much more to see. Yet never had he been so desperate to know more about a specific human. Never had he found each new discovery as wonderful as the one before.

Each one striking a chord within him, as she had from the first. And striking another as she changed.

As all humans did. Rare was the Guardian whom time did not alter in some way—and in time, they became more solidly themselves. He’d never see what Andromeda would become. But Michael knew that of the eight thousand years he’d lived, she was already his favorite part.

She opened her eyes. Her gaze tripped over his smile and slid away from his face. Fighting herself and her attraction to him. He hoped to soon see the end of that battle. The outcome would be her choice, so whether she surrendered to her desire or defeated it, she would win.

So would he. It would be one more piece to take with him.

To his surprise, she accepted the hand he offered and rose to her feet. Was she proving to herself that she could touch him without a physical response? Or did she not worry whether she felt anything?

Perhaps it was neither of those reasons. Perhaps her mind was simply already on the job.

“So is Alejandro alone?”

“Yes, but we’re going to find Irena first. It will take several jumps.”

She grimaced and braced herself. “All right.”

He drew her against his left side, called in a sword to his right hand, and formed his wings. Irena might have already slain the nosferatu, but he wouldn’t take that chance. Nosferatu were as swift as demons, bloodthirsty, and vicious—even Michael didn’t always escape unscathed.

Andromeda’s fingers clenched on his sleeve when he teleported to the mouth of the cave. Stiff grasses bent under his feet. The odor of moss and rich soil all but overwhelmed the lingering metallic scent of the nosferatu. Below, the steep mountainside dropped to a green plateau dotted with grazing sheep. Long shadows lay across the fields, cast by the light of a rising full moon. He recognized the peaks to the north.

The Carpathians. The nosferatu probably knew nothing of the vampiric legends from this land. It would have come here to hide—or it might have been hiding here for thousands of years and only recently emerged. Hunted by both Guardians and demons, most nosferatu had retreated underground. Psychic sweeps couldn’t penetrate thick stone, so the creatures could remain undetected for centuries.

Methodically, he began trying to teleport deeper and deeper into the mountain. He couldn’t jump into solid stone. If there wasn’t room for them, he and Andromeda simply wouldn’t go.

He hit a cavern. Water dripping, smooth slippery stone underfoot, no other heartbeats. The nosferatu’s scent gave him a direction. Another jump and a crevice opened beneath him. His wings snapped wide and caught air, feathered tips sweeping the sheer walls. He teleported to the bottom. The metallic odor strengthened.

The final cavern was larger than the first, with a thirty-foot-high ceiling spiked with stalactites. His heartbeat and Andromeda’s. One heart directly overhead. A familiar heart to his left.

Irena. The strongest and the oldest of the human-born Guardians, and the one who led them now. He couldn’t have chosen a better successor. Two and a half thousand years before—after Michael’s sister had led hundreds of Guardians to slaughter a human army, after Khavi had disappeared, and with all of the other grigori missing or dead—Michael had given every other Guardian the choice to Ascend to judgment or Fall, and he’d carried on alone for centuries. When he’d finally begun to rebuild the Guardian corps, Irena had been one of the first transformed. A former slave of Rome, she had secured her freedom, then sacrificed her life to save her fellow slaves from a different nosferatu. She had been fierce then, a whetted blade in search of a battle. Time had not dulled that. Now ferocity sharpened every line of her body.

He teleported again, putting the cave wall at his back. Five feet away, Irena paused in her hunter’s crawl, her kukri knife clamped between her teeth.

Her snarl curled her lips and the blue tattoos snaking around her arms seemed to coil in preparation for a strike. Her gaze flicked to him for an instant. Irritation sprang from her psyche on a discordant shriek, followed by joy upon seeing Andromeda, then intense hatred when she returned her attention to the nosferatu clinging to the ceiling.

“Kill it quickly,” Michael said, then laughed when the poisonous glow of her green eyes shone through the cavern.

The nosferatu had known she was there. But she still enjoyed stalking it—testing herself against the creature, which had been stalking her in turn. To Irena, the hunt was an art, and Michael’s noisy interruption akin to watching a bumbling drunkard slap muddy hands over a master painter’s canvas.

Michael felt no small pride at her skill; he’d trained her himself. She’d also been the first of the new Guardians whom he’d called a friend, though that love made him vulnerable to loss and betrayal again.

But Irena wouldn’t have allowed anything less. She was fierce in everything—her friendship, her love, her anger, her hatred. Among the Guardians, her venomous loathing of demons was unequaled.

When she had discovered that Michael was the son of a demon, the knowledge had hurt her more than any other. The loss of her trust had hurt
him
more than losing any other’s.

Until Andromeda Taylor.

With time, Irena had come to trust him again. That gave him hope that Andromeda would as well. With time.

He did not have much of that left.

At his side, Andromeda’s throat worked. She turned and pressed her forehead into his chest. Still unbalanced. Michael tightened his arm around her.

He hated knowing how soon he’d have to let go.

“How many more jumps?”

“We’re here.”

Her face lifted. “You said there’d be several.”

“There were. I did it quickly.” Less than a half second between Seattle and this cavern. In her disorientation, it would have felt like only one teleportation.

She blinked and nodded. A small vertical line formed between her eyebrows as she inhaled.

Smelling the nosferatu. Good.

“Listen for the heartbeat,” he said, then grinned at Irena’s exasperated sigh. “The cavern distorts the sound. But you can follow it to the source.”

She paused. Looked up. Her gaze narrowed on the pale creature. A note of fear leaked through her psychic shields.

Motionless, eyes fixed on Irena, the nosferatu clung to a stalactite with razored talons. The stone pillar shielded its torso. Seven feet tall, it possessed a longer reach than Michael did. Its mind burned with bloodlust. If Irena had been human, she would have been dead moments after entering the cave—blood consumed, body ripped apart. But the creatures had killed many Guardians, too. In Michael’s lifetime, the same fate had happened to hundreds of them. Despite their endless thirst, nosferatu were patient. They didn’t underestimate their opponents. This one would wait for the advantage of position before attacking.

A gun appeared in Andromeda’s hand. Michael fought the instinct to put himself in front of her, to tell her that she would never need to defend herself as long as he was near. But she’d been right about the difference between protecting her and smothering her. Better to teach, to give her a fighting chance.

“A crossbow is better at a distance,” he told her. “If it attacks, switch to a sword.”

“Tell that to Irena,” she said, but replaced the gun with a crossbow. “She’s only got a big knife.”

Not just any knife. The furnace of a dragon’s heart still heated the angled blade. But Irena would have used a knife regardless. She liked to get close, to scent the spurting blood and hear the rending of flesh.

And she was repeatedly stabbing the blade into the stone beneath her as if she wished to stab Michael’s head instead.

“Do you think she would listen?” he asked Andromeda, and she grinned.

With another baleful glance, Irena formed her wings, white feathers arching behind her shoulders.

Michael frowned. Would she attack the nosferatu now? It held a stronger position than she did. And Irena was rash, but she wasn’t a fool.

“It is yours,” she said to him instead. “Do not spill the blood.”

She jumped into the air—a distraction. Leaving Andromeda on the cavern floor, Michael teleported behind the nosferatu. Watching Irena, it almost didn’t sense him in time. But it was fast, strong. Clinging to the ceiling with its feet, the nosferatu swung toward him. Their swords rang in a bone-jarring clash of steel. While its arms were still extended, Michael teleported again and chopped through its neck. He vanished the body into his cache before a drop of blood fell.

He looked down and his every muscle stiffened. Irena was stalking toward Andromeda. He teleported back as the other Guardian reached for her—and forced himself to stand absolutely still.

Irena would not hurt her.

“It
is
you.” She caught Andromeda’s face between her hands. “Lower your shields, let me be certain.”

Andromeda did. Michael closed his eyes. Her strong melody echoed through him, slipping between the bonds of Khavi’s spell, muffling the painful dissonance tearing at every cell in his body. Then she raised her shields and the song was gone.

“I have missed you.” Irena rested her forehead against Andromeda’s. “And I have heard that you want to Fall.”

“Yes.”

“You donkey-fucking idiot,” Irena said, her insult warmed by affection. “I warn you now that I will do all that I can to convince you to remain as you are.”

Andromeda answered with a noncommittal smile. “Where are we?”

“Romania.” Though Irena gave her a narrowed look at the obvious diversion, she did not try to convince Andromeda now. Releasing her, she turned to Michael. “Khavi came to me and said that Lucifer would soon be in Chaos. I did not know whether to believe her until I received a text from Alejandro this morning. You have seen the Pit emptied?”

“Yes.”

She nodded and vanished her knife. “I have been hunting nosferatu in more earnest of late. For those vampires who will fight with us, the nosferatu blood will make them stronger. For those humans who want to transform, they will be nosferatu-born and already strong. That strength will also ease the minds of those who love them.”

On the last, Irena glanced at Andromeda, her brows raised expectantly.

Andromeda held up her hands as if to stop her. “I’m not becoming a vampire after I Fall, either.”

Irena frowned. She looked to Michael again. He shook his head. Andromeda did not yet know what Joseph Preston and Carolyn Taylor planned for their futures, but it was not his place to tell her—particularly as it might influence Andromeda’s decision to become human again.

Though the tattoos on Irena’s arms wavered in an uncertain dance, she did not speak of it, either. “What news of Brandt?”

“A vampire killed him. The government has disavowed Special Investigations. Alejandro asks for you.”

“What is ‘disavowed’?”

“They will say we never existed. And if we are exposed, they will claim they had nothing to do with us.”

“So I must meet with the pig politicians. You don’t wish to?” She gave him a hopeful look, then sighed and held out her hand. “All right, then.”