The Guardian (11 page)

“You
are
a mind reader.” She forced a smile. He was right; she wouldn't have believed him. And she would
have to be in Kent's presence to discover if Tumseneha possessed his body.

“Hardly. You don't have to be clairvoyant to know you carry those trust issues around like shields,” he said, his eyes glistening with annoyance, though his deep voice put a downy edge on his words. “One day I hope you'll trust me.”

“I hope so, too.” She told him what he wanted to hear. Trust someone who was full of contradictions, who hid his soul behind powerful magic, who played a starring role in her last bedroom drama? For all those reasons she couldn't let down her guard around him.

She gave him a sidelong glance. “I'm still going to check out the only good lead we have.”

“I thought as much,” he said with cold resignation.

“You can see about the forensic report.”

“Not without you.”

“Now who's suspicious?” She boldly smiled at him.

“It's not going to work.”

“What?”

“Trying to get rid of me.”

“Can't blame a body for trying.”

Fala headed for the door, Stephen on her heels, the barrier surrounding him following her like a massive black hole. Any moment she felt it could suck her in and carry her off into oblivion. She shivered as she left the office.

 

Stephen saw that the snow had all but stopped, the sky spitting only frozen teardrops now. It really had been a bizarre, freakish storm. Global warming at its best.

Stephen followed Fala down the busy sidewalk,
passing masses of people. He deliberately stayed a foot behind her so he could watch the tempting stir of her hips below her waist-length jacket, the long, slender legs that could wrap a man in more than just warmth, the amazing braid that fell to the small of her back. He longed to unbraid her hair and see it spill over her naked body. This need to have her was driving him crazy. He must focus on his plan. She was only the means to free his brothers. Nothing else. He had to get a handle on these feelings for her.

Are you controlling her, or is it the other way around?

Stephen flinched at the unbidden blinding power shooting through his mind, drumming in his temples.

She must have sensed something, for she turned and looked at him. “Are you okay?” Her eyelids lowered with real worry.

He found it almost impossible to talk to her while a telepathic squall blew through his mind. “Yeah, I'll just make a call and see if Kent's at home.” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

“Okay, see you at the car.”

Stephen nodded to her and pretended to make the call.
Stop doing that, or you're going to compromise everything.

No, you will do that all on your own—if you are not careful. You are not becoming a true admirer, are you?
The voice came back and sandblasted through his thoughts, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the pain.

No.

See that you do not. A Guardian's physical wiles are
legendary, more dangerous than a siren's. She will reel you in and destroy you in a blink, before you have a chance to save your brothers.

At the mention of his brothers, Stephen felt his heart sink with emptiness and dread.
I know what I must do.

Good. Manipulate her, use her for sport, just make sure you do not fail in your purpose.

Stephen felt the energy leave his skull. He squeezed his eyes closed once again and fought the throbbing in his head, the knotting of his gut. The cold air and tiny bits of ice cleared his mind. Had he told the truth? Could he keep a level head around Fala? He groaned deep in his throat, and he sounded like a sad, dying animal.

 

It was slow going down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Beetle slipped, skimmed, and slid on the slushy Tarmac. Daylight swiftly faded between sinister clouds that looked more like thunder heads than snow bearers. Fala fought the wintry slush and wished she hadn't been forced to drive in rush hour on slick roads, but Stephen had said his teleportation powers didn't work on other people. He could transport only his own atoms through time and space.

She shifted, and her knuckles brushed the side of his hard thigh. It sent a shock wave up to her shoulder. He had to be keeping his leg there on purpose. She made a sharp right turn onto Southern Avenue, skidded and enjoyed watching his right arm hit the door. The leg didn't move. So much for police driver training.

They hadn't spoken since they left the Hart Building. After he'd made that call he'd grown even more distracted
and grim. He hadn't said two words to her, other than assuring her Kent was home and would receive them.

Fala wanted to keep it that way, though the silence that stretched between had taken on a persona all its own, wringing the air within the small Bug, squeezing it until all she could hear was his heavy breathing. Those intense, mercurial looks he kept shooting at her weren't helping, either. She turned down the heater, because it suddenly felt like a steam room inside her car.

When she couldn't take it any longer, she said, “I don't know anything about you. I mean sometimes I detect a hint of a Maine accent in your voice.”

“Do you? I worked hard to get rid of it,” he said, his words cynical.

“I only hear it surface sometimes.” This seemed to take the edge off his expression, and she said, “So I'm guessing you're from there, or close by.” She crept around the Washington traffic circle, barely missing the side of a taxi. She honked at the driver.

“My parents owned a little island off the coast.”

“A whole island? You kin to Aristotle Onassis or something?”

The tightness around his mouth softened. “My family settled Keykinny hundreds of years ago and claimed the island.”

“Sounds like your heritage goes back a ways.”

“To the Celtic Druids.”

“It must be nice having an island. Do you visit Keykinny?”

“No.” His lips hardened and he jammed his hands in his pockets.

“Because…?” she prodded.

He reminded silent, withdrawn, cloaked in the layer of reserve he wore, then he finally said, “The coven lives there.”

“Oh.” She heard the jagged edge in his deep voice, and she felt sympathy for him. Whatever happened to make the coven banish him was still a raw wound. She said, “You want to tell me what happened?”

He paused over a moment of indecision, then spoke. “My parents died when we—” he faltered, then said “—I mean, when
I
was eight.”

“That must have been hard.”

“I still miss them,” he said, his voice rough with emotion.

This was the first glimpse Fala had that he actually had a heart. He wasn't as cold on the inside as he appeared.

At her silence, he continued, “After my parents' death, my uncle became my legal guardian.”

“How was that?”

“I learned a lot of things from my uncle, like how to lie, how to betray family members, and the true meaning of the word
cruel.
” He clenched his jaw and choked off the rest of his words, as if he realized that he'd revealed more than he deemed comfortable. He shifted his lanky legs, moving his knee over slightly. Then he said, “What about you? How was your childhood?”

“I had it better than you. My grandmother was strict, domineering and wise, but never cruel. Her heart is pure gold. I admire her for taking us in.”

“You and your sisters?”

“Yes.” How had he known about her sisters? Then she remembered he'd said he had a dossier on her and her
family. He probably knew what she liked for breakfast and how many guys she'd dated over her life. A pitiful few.

“Why did your mother leave you in her care?”

“Oh, that's a tale to tell.” Fala rolled her eyes and put on the brakes as she reached a line of traffic.

When he remained silent and let her speak at her own pace, she said, “Really, it's more a love story.”

He snorted when she mentioned love. “You mean a fairy tale.”

She shot him a quick look. Was he so jaded he couldn't love someone? By the cynical tone in his voice and that forbidding expression etched in his features, she was certain of it. For some reason her voice strained and cracked as she said, “It really is a love story, but without a happy ending.”

“Figures. What happened?”

“You're the G-man, don't you already know?”

He shook his head, his raven hair damp and glistening from the snow. “Only minor details. Like the day she left, that kind of thing.”

Fala crept along behind a blue Jeep. “Well, my mother made the mistake of falling in love with Running Deer.”

“Running Deer?”

“Her intended mate chosen by our spirit guides.”

“That was a bad thing?”

“Well, my parents were so much in love they didn't want to wait until her twenty-eighth birthday to marry, so they ran away and got hitched by a Justice of the Peace. They lived somewhere for three and half years, and we were born. My grandmother searched high and low
for them and could never find them. Then one day my mother showed up on my grandmother's doorstep, hardly alive, crying that my father had died, and she couldn't care for us. My grandmother offered her forgiveness and begged her to come back to the reservation because, as you know, she was destined to be the next Guardian. My grandmother offered to protect her, but my mother refused.”

“Why do you think she refused?”

“My mother had always been rebellious. A real thorn in my grandmother's side, but I think my father's death broke her wild spirit. My grandmother said she turned to drugs for comfort.”

“Do you ever see her?”

“No. We think she's living in Ontario somewhere, but we're not certain.”

“And do you ever wonder what would have happened had it been different?” he asked, his expression pensive, as if he were thinking about his own fate.

“Sometimes, but I couldn't have asked for a better role model than my grandmother. And I've forgiven my mother long ago. She defied the spirit guides and paid a high price.”

“I envy your capacity to love,” he said, silence hanging on the heels of his words.

Sympathy tugged at her. He'd lost so much, his parents, his home, and he'd built ramparts around that pain to hold it in. “My people have a saying, ‘Sow seeds in the heart, and spring will grow there.'”

“Only if spring can thaw the winter ice.” His silver eyes penetrated the distance between them.

The desire she saw in them sent a ripple of excitement
through her. Oh, how could his looks be so arousing, and his energy feel so impervious and forbidding and aloof? He was a puzzle she longed to put together, but she knew she had to avoid him at all costs.

She purposely ended the conversation and slowed along Twenty-fifth Street, squinting through the rising fog. This area was aptly named Foggy Bottom, one of the oldest low-lying neighborhoods in the District. It was an affluent, renovated part of the city, its three-story row houses painted a myriad of yuppie colors. But tonight the dampness had ushered in a haze that obscured them in swirling hues of gray. The area lived up to its name tonight.

She found Number 13, a three-story row house at the end of the block. Misty talons rose and coiled and retreated around the first-floor windows like ghost energies that eddied along gravestones. Icy tentacles of fear vibrated along her spine. She cringed inwardly as she found a parking spot on the street several houses down.

Then it happened. The metal hanging down her chest came alive. The hairs at the back of her neck acted like antennae, and she felt the wails of Tumseneha's dead innocent victims, the cries of those he currently tormented, the madness that churned within his black dominion. And then the sensation intensified, a feeling as if he were stomping over her grave—no, dancing on it, an ancient war dance they had practiced for millennia, the dance between good and evil. But this was his victory dance. Oh, God! He was here!

S
tephen saw the blood drain from Fala's face. Her knuckles whitened as she clenched the steering wheel. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

He gazed back at the house. The first-floor windows were all but covered by the fog, the front steps floating somewhere in its midst. Only the second and third floors were visible, but they were all dark. A porch light shifted jaundiced waves over the brass Number 13 placard near the door. Hill House had nothing over on Kent's place tonight.

A sudden urge hit Stephen. He didn't want Fala anywhere near that house, and he said, “Look, let me go in first and check things out. You stay here.”

“Don't give me orders.” Fala's face took on a hard-pinched edge, the dimple in her chin tightening.

“Stop being pigheaded and I might.”

“I'm not. I told you I can take care of myself. I have enough to worry about without having to watch your back.” She glanced at the house, her complexion ashen and haunted and anxious. “You stay here.”

“Like hell. What's got you so spooked?”

She paused and said, “Okay, will you stay in the car if I tell you the truth?”

He agreed with a nod of his head.

“The werewolf who attacked us in the alley and killed Katrina Sanecki is under the control of an evil sorcerer who wants my powers.”

“How do you know all this?”

Terror glistened in her glassy blue eyes, and he prodded her again. “Fala, tell me the truth.”

After a moment of looking torn on trusting him, she finally said, “This sorcerer's hatred for Guardians goes back a long way, but…” She studied him with a perplexed expression. “If you know about me, you have to know about Tumseneha.”

Stephen's brows narrowed. “Yes, but he's known as Balphegar in our files.” He added, “BOSP's American translation for this demon sorcerer. If my memory serves me, he was a pretty nasty character before he was banished. Are you saying he's loose on earth?”

“Exactly. I would have thought BOSP would have been all over him.”

“We're good, but we can't monitor all supernatural entities, particularly if he's as powerful as our records say he is and he can hide anywhere.”

“You have no idea what he's capable of.” The blue in her eyes sharpened. “Inhabiting human bodies is just one
of his many talents. Conjuring and controlling werewolf spirits is another.”

“You think Tumseneha—” he stumbled over the Patomani name “—conjured that killer werewolf and ordered it to inhabit the senator's body?”

“Yes. That way Tumseneha could slip into Kent's body and control both of them at once. It's not above his power. It's all clear to me now.” The crease between her dark brows deepened. “When he fought you in the alley, he had a reason for not killing you. It's all about the hunt and the fear and the manipulation. Oh, he must be reveling in the fact of how easily he brought us here.”

“We can battle him together.”

“No way.” Fala rounded on him. “You told me you'd stay in the car.”

“Actually, I never said I would.”

“You nodded. That's good as a handshake.”

“Not in my line of work. You're not going in there alone. You're too valuable to—” He caught himself before he said
me.
“The good side.”

“I don't need your death on my conscience.” She reached over, grabbed his face and kissed him.

He reveled in the hot tantalizing power of her lips for a second; it sizzled and crackled, and he found himself drawing her closer, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, giving himself over to her. He felt the medallion pressing into his chest, hitting the same mark it had left after they'd made love, and he actually felt it digging down between his ribs, feeling the pounding thump of his own heartbeat against it.

Her kiss seared and teased and gnawed at the powerful
magic that protected him from her. And he wanted more of her warmth.

She gave it to him. Her mouth hardened as she grabbed the sides of his cheeks, pinning her mouth to his. Then he felt her draining his breath from his lungs, pulling at his life force like a magnet, siphoning it from him.

The magic protecting him recoiled, sprang up and retreated again, a tenuous hold he felt being battered and tested and reshaped. He knew what she was doing.

No! No! No!

He reached up to break the kiss, but she stole the rest of his breath from his lungs so fast pain tore through his ribs.

It was too late! He felt himself losing consciousness, felt the pain in his lungs, felt his mind turning to blurry soup. He slumped against her and the last thing he heard was “You left me no choice. I haven't killed you. You'll wake up in a few minutes.”

Damn her!

 

Fala pushed Stephen's slumped body back in his seat, the taste of him lingering on her mouth, her body still tensed from the contact. She felt sort of bad about tricking him, but then he had lied to her about staying in the car, and she'd told him things about Tumseneha she already regretted. And gosh knows what else he'd lied about. It served him right, didn't it? She might not have been able to sense his aura and break through that magic shield, but she had been able to physically capture his breath, an old house-cat trick Meikoda had shown her when she first began tutoring Fala in her powers. Okay,
so it was sneaky. But it was for Stephen's own good. She wasn't about to have his death hanging over her.

She summoned all her courage, pulled the .45 from her shoulder holster, and exited the car, her senses on the prowl. She tuned out the constant noise of the city and centered on her immediate surroundings. Tumseneha was definitely here. It was as if his aura had left brick walls and she was hitting them. Adrenaline rushed through her. Her pulse pounded in her neck, and the eerie silence around the yard and house came at her like beating drums.

Her pistol gripped securely in both hands, she crept to the side of the house, the fog swirling around her lower body.

She paused beneath a window and peeked inside at a study. A light burned on a desk. Rows of bookshelves. An Oriental carpet. No one to be seen.

She tried the window.

Locked.

Her grip on the gun butt tightened as she reached the privacy fence. She cleared the six-foot barrier with ease and landed in a barren garden bed, her feet crackling in the layer of thin ice stuck to the mulch.

Her hot breaths condensed around her face as she scanned the evergreens and boxwoods that lined hibernating flower beds, the dead summer stalks frail bones in the shadowy night. Fog rolled over the back fence and inched gray fingers over the mermaid fountain standing in a corner.

Nothing moved but the steady drip drip of the gutters.

Tumseneha had not recently been in the backyard—the
aura wasn't as sensory-grinding here—but she could feel it throbbing from the house's walls.

She crept toward a patio and the French doors. The back of the house stood in total darkness. She peeked through the door's windowpanes. Shadows covered kitchen counters, a bar and stools, and a pot rack with arms of metal grasping at air. Empty.

Her acute hearing wasn't picking up anything, the vast silence screamed in her ears. Where were the heartbeats, the strum of evil moving through his supernatural veins? She should be able to hear Tumseneha's vile heart. Why couldn't she sense it? The charm was going crazy, vibrating until it almost burned her skin.

Fala steeled her courage and tried the door.

Open.

The hinges rasped like a casket, deafening in the eerie silence. Then she slipped inside.

 

Stephen came to, his lungs on fire, the world spinning. Air. He needed air. He gasped for breath, his spine bending almost double as he threw his head back and sucked in life-giving air. The back of his head hit something and sent another shock wave through his brain.

He gasped, held his head and tried to focus. The world remained a blur. He'd felt hangovers after barhopping with Brice and Leland, but he'd never felt anything this temple-bursting.

His head finally settled enough for him to acclimate to his surroundings. Fala. He remembered her now, kissing him, her lips hot on his mouth, then that crafty shape-
shifter crap, sucking out his breath. She'd gone in without him. The little witch!

She couldn't get hurt. He needed her to free his brothers. Or was it
just
that? He hated to admit it, but after making love to her she'd gotten under his skin. Way under. And he hated himself for having feelings and being torn between her and his brothers.

He blinked, righted his world, then grabbed the door handle. He rolled out, cold air hitting his face. The fog was an icy mist and it prickled his cheeks as he stumbled toward Number 13.

Thirteen had always been a lucky number for him. He hoped it wouldn't let him down tonight. He didn't want Fala in danger. Fear began to eat at him in earnest, and he waved a hand along his body and concentrated. Mist swirled as he disappeared into the house.

 

Fala prowled down the hallway, realizing the ceilings in this Victorian had to be a good eighteen feet high. When she reached the staircase, she pressed her back against the wall and swept the gun barrel up the stairs. Through the hovering darkness at the top of the steps. Along the balcony. Clear.

She crept toward the study. Again she used the wall, back tight to it. Her gun arced through the door frame.

She gasped. A wing chair hidden from the window's view now faced her and the stiff body within. Jane Kent's eyes stared past Fala, at whatever had killed her, the wild dying light caught in her eyes like a photograph, her mouth frozen in a death rictus. She'd been stripped down to her bra and panties. Ropes bound her arms and
legs. A fireplace poker carelessly lay beside the chair. What looked like burns from the poker covered her flesh. Tumseneha's handiwork.

The sight sickened Fala. Another innocent lost. She didn't have to check for a pulse. Rigor had set in. Mrs.Kent had been dead for some time.

She had to stop this devil. Here. Now. She knew the battle would be to the death. It was an inescapable conclusion to this madness that neither of them could avoid, the infinite battle of good versus evil, the war all the Guardians before her had fought and was now her responsibility.

Her resolve firmly in place, Fala crouched her way down the hall, her breathing heavy—she was certain Tumseneha could hear it and her erratic heartbeat, the pulse of fear. How he must be enjoying this.

Lamp rays shot out from the next doorway, drawing a jagged diamond on the hardwood floor. Tumseneha was there. The charm all but screamed his name. And his essence ballooned in every square inch of the hallway, the trail sickly and thick, riding the air waves like a giant raven.

Heart kicking her ribs, adrenaline like icy black ink in her veins, she crept forward. All those years of nightmares, the trauma, the sweating, waking on screams, the battles they had fought in another realm ate away at her composure. A tremor went through her, and something she'd never felt before, her hair standing on end. Literally. She could feel the hair follicles tightening, quilling up over her scalp.

She held her breath, pressed her back against the wall, and wheeled into the room. Startled, she looked into a face, but not the one she expected.