Hard Breaker Read online

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  For my Girl,

  because everything is different without her.

  I miss you, Flopsy.

  The Beginning

  Once upon a time when the world was young and magic lived, a tenuous balance existed between the Light and the Darkness. The Light created and the Darkness destroyed. The Light illuminated and the Darkness obscured. The Light gave and the Darkness seized.

  But in all things, the Darkness grew discontented. It sent its servants among the inhabitants of the earth to sway humanity into its thrall. It gathered power to itself, but the more it gained, the more it wanted.

  It shaped itself into the form of Seven Demons, creatures of pure evil that existed only to feed on the souls of humanity. Glutted with strength, they would join together and devour the Light itself.

  Humanity quaked. Against the powers of the Darkness, most had no defenses. Only those gifted with the ability to wield the energy of magic could affect the Darkness and its servants. These few joined together as Wardens, forming a Guild to stand against evil, but even they lacked the strength for victory. They needed a weapon of immense power, something that could only be granted by the Light itself. Joining their magic, they performed a spell of summoning and brought forth the Guardians.

  Seven warriors answered the summoning, created by the Light to be its champions. Enormous, immortal figures, winged and powerful, descended from the skies. Each wielded a weapon in hand, but also possessed fangs and claws to tear apart their enemies. They became the Guardians of humanity and fought a long and bloody war against the Demons of the Darkness.

  Blood spilled and the earth trembled, but at the end of the struggle, the Guardians of the Light prevailed. They tore the Seven Demons apart and cast them from the mortal plane into prisons prepared by the Wardens. Their duty finished, they stood among the humans as warriors without a war, inhuman, alien, and powerful. The Wardens of the Guild felt the Guardians had no place on the mortal plane and used their magic to send the immortal warriors into slumber. Encased in skins of stone, they slept through ages of men until once again, the Darkness threatened to break free into the world of humans.

  The Guardians once again completed their task of ridding the human world of the threat from the Demons, and once again they were sent to slumber by the Wardens. They woke, they fought, and they slept. Time after time after time.

  Eventually, the first Guardians lost any interest in protecting humanity. They had no connection to the people they defended, spent no time with them, and knew little of their characters or their customs. After several cycles, a time came when the Wardens summoned the Guardians to defend them from a new threat, but the Guardians did not wake. They failed to respond to the humans’ need, and it looked as if the mortal world would fall to the Darkness.

  The Guild despaired. Until one day, a woman of power—one who had magic of her own—appeared and ignored the Wardens’ attempts to dismiss her. She knew the danger to humanity was great and that the Guardians represented the only hope for her people to survive. So she knelt at the feet of the statue of a Guardian and she prayed for him to awaken and defend her. The Wardens scoffed and berated her, but her pleas worked. The Guardian responded to her as if to a summons and woke from his magical slumber. He claimed the woman as his Warden and his mate and once again took up arms against the Darkness.

  One by one, more women of power appeared and woke the Guardians, becoming their helpers and their mates. The supernatural warriors defeated the forces of Darkness, but once the threat was vanquished, they refused to return to sleep and be parted from their mates. Instead, they remained among the humans, giving up their immortality to live out their days with their partners. New Guardians were summoned, and the legends recorded that any who came after retained the right to find a human mate and to forfeit their position to remain at her side.

  Prologue

  Ivy turned, the covers tangled around her legs, but she didn’t feel it. Or rather, it didn’t register, her mind already occupied with a source of far greater discomfort. It echoed within her, loud, agonized, and dreadfully familiar.

  I call thee forth, warrior of stone, to stand against the Enemy of All. Stir, and awaken.

  Uncle George? In sleep, her brow furrowed and her head twisted on the pillow. She knew the voice but not the words. Mom’s brother, confirmed eccentric. Black sheep in a family of decidedly gray ones. The one who spoke openly about magic and supernatural gifts and some endless, covert struggle against the forces of Darkness. As a child, Ivy had found his stories as chilling and exciting as the ones about the hook-handed killer, or the witch who appeared to steal your soul if you chanted her name three times into your mirror. She had never believed any of them, but she had sat and listened, wide-eyed and enthralled, to each and every one.

  Dad, I just heard something. I think someone is out there.

  Jamie’s voice now, just as familiar. If Ivy had listened intently to her uncle’s stories, his son had hung on every word, learning them like holy gospel. Visits to and from the U.K. had never happened often enough, and Ivy had always looked wildly forward to the chance to reconnect and play with the cousin who had been a bare year older than herself. But while she had wanted to play ball or cops and robbers or intrepid jungle explorers, all Jamie wanted was to play at being Wardens and protecting the world from the demon invasion. Strangely enough, not games her friends in suburban New York had prepared her for. She always felt as if she had gotten the wrong script. She had played along, though, because Jamie was just that convincing.

  And also because there wasn’t much else to do at Uncle George’s country house.

  The familiarity bred by those long visits meant that even asleep, Ivy’s subconscious had no trouble recognizing George’s and Jamie’s well-loved voices. Their tones, though … those made her frown in her sleep and twist again atop her rapidly warming mattress.

  I need a few more minutes, boy. I have to complete the summoning. Once he wakes, we’ll have nothing to fear.

  Once who wakes? Ivy wanted to ask. What was going on? She could hear urgency and fear underlying her uncle’s cool, British reserve, the same emotions that bubbled over in her cousin’s words, but as usual, she could see nothing. Her talent never allowed her to put any images to what she heard. Clairaudience, the experts labeled it. Eavesdropping fit better. At least, Ivy thought so. Clairaudience sounded too scientific, as if she had some kind of radio receiver inside her head that she could tune to a certain frequency to pick up whatever sounds she wanted at any given time.

  Wouldn’t that have been convenient? But no, Ivy hadn’t gotten so lucky. Instead of that radio receiver, she had gotten the same sort of reception as the poor schmuck in that old joke whose tooth filling occasionally made opera broadcasts spill out whenever he opened his mouth. Ivy never got to choose what she could hear. It only came to her at the moments she least wanted to hear, moments filled with anger or fear or soul-wrenching gri
ef. It had to be powered by emotion, and somehow the most powerful emotions always seemed to be the most painful ones.

  Clairaudial empathy, someone had suggested as a label. Ivy just called it her curse.

  She began to struggle against the choking grip of sleep. Her subconscious recognized the fear in her cousin’s voice, the urgency in her uncle’s. She might not know what the two of them were talking about inside her head, but she knew it was important, and she knew they felt as if they might be in danger. If she didn’t wake up, she would be unable to help them.

  Hell, she might not be able to help them anyway, but at least if she were awake, she might have a chance. Asleep, she only counted as so much dead weight.

  Lethargy clung to her. Ivy fought hard, but somehow the unconsciousness seemed to fight back, holding her down like a hand in the face of a drowning victim. She even found herself struggling to breathe the same way, and it got harder to tell the difference between her relatives’ fear and her own mounting panic.

  Wake up, Ivy, she commanded herself. They need you. Wake up and get them help. Do it. Now.

  Come forth, Guardian. Uncle George spoke with both authority and a new sense of urgency, a frantic sort of demand. It sounded almost like desperation.

  A crash echoed in her mind, the kind of boom that would have shaken the ground of the surrounding area. Ivy could almost swear she felt the vibrations.

  Hurry up, Dad. We need to get out of here. They’re coming.

  I know. I’m trying. The spell isn’t working, though. Something is wrong.

  Another thundering crash, and Jamie swore. We need to leave. We can try another night.

  No, we can’t. If they find him here in this state, they can destroy him. He needs to waken, otherwise all we’ve done is lead the Order straight to him.

  We don’t have time.

  We don’t have a choice.

  There was a moment of silence. Well, not so much silence as the absence of voices. The bone-rattling booms continued, like God’s door knocker being plied by the devil himself.

  Maybe we do. We can hide him.

  How? her uncle demanded. He sounded confused and testy, like someone had presented him with a mug of tea without offering up a biscuit alongside. He’s a bit bloody hard to miss, don’t you think?

  I found a spell, Jamie said. In that book you dug up a few weeks ago. It’s supposed to be undetectable, even to the nocturnis. I have it memorized. It’s got to at least be worth a try.

  The next boom came louder than the others, if that was possible, and was accompanied by a sharp cracking sound, like wood splitting under the blade of an axe.

  I don’t think we have any choice, Jamie insisted. We’ve run out of time.

  Another pause.

  Do it.

  Ivy heard a rush of air, like a deep inhalation, then the sound of her cousin chanting something in a language she almost recognized. Not French, which she spoke a little, and not Latin, which she didn’t, but something similar and just out of her reach.

  She might not recognize the words, but she had no trouble with the cadence. Jamie spoke quickly, his voice low and urgent, full of power and will. She recognized it from all the times he had stayed up late into the night while her family visited him, after the adults thought them both tucked safely into bed. The wall between their rooms hadn’t been thick enough to hide the fact that every spare moment not spent playing at being just like his father, Jamie had been studying so that one day he would be just like his father. He couldn’t hide it from Ivy, though. Little pseudosisters could be better than spymasters when curiosity and twinges of jealousy spurred them forward.

  You’ve done it, Uncle George cried, sounding almost as surprised as he did relieved. Now we need to disappear, too. Come on.

  All at once, the booming and the cracking ceased and a deafening explosion reverberated in their place. It shook Ivy even in sleep, and though she still could see nothing, she could hear, mixed with the echo of the sonic wave, the patter of stone falling like rain, and dust whooshing along as if caught in the wake of a hurricane.

  Then there was silence.

  Terrible, black, empty, suffocating silence.

  Ivy shot out of sleep, sitting up in a rush of motion, choking on the air she struggled to draw into protesting lungs. Her bedroom remained dark and still, but the sounds of collapsing rubble still filled her head. Her heart raced as if she had just run a marathon. A slick film of sweat coated her skin, making her thin cotton gown cling to her uncomfortably. She trembled from head to toe as the reality of what she had heard began to sink in.

  “Jamie,” she whispered into the night. “Uncle George. What have you done?”

  With shaking hands, she fumbled for her phone and silently began to pray.

  Chapter One

  She had spent a week casing the joint, or at least that’s how she liked to think of it. It calmed her nerves to view these things in terms of B-movie plots. Keeping the notion of danger mildly amusing instead of terrifying made it easier to do her job without ill-timed cases of the freak-outs.

  It also made it easy to slip out the staff door at the rear of the pub at the proper time and return through the front five minutes later looking like an entirely different person. Her bag had been stashed in the alley behind the bins, well wrapped in plastic. She continued to hold out hope that one of these days she’d get to Scooby-Doo it and use a hole in a big old oak tree as her hiding place, but those were hard to come by in Croydon, South London. A girl had to work with what was available.

  She wouldn’t call her new appearance a disguise, exactly. More like camouflage. The secret wasn’t to not be recognized (extremely unlikely given the total number of people she knew in this country had been cut in half a few months ago), it was to not stand out. Her natural coloring of bright red hair and glow-in-the-dark pale skin drew too many eyes, so she covered them up with something a little more common. Pancake makeup took care of the pallor, and to complete the picture, she had slathered on lipstick the approximate color of a double-decker bus and enough mascara and eyeliner to make a raccoon feel insecure. A wig sporting dark roots and brassy blond highlights covered up her own distinctive strands and presented just the right level of delinquent hair-color maintenance to make her convincing as a lapsed brunette.

  Since clothes made the woman, she paid attention to those as well. Her tight skinny jeans disappeared into a pair of bulky, unstructured boots that looked like they belonged on either a moon landing or an unfortunate Inuit. Personally, she thought they were uglier than sin, but they possessed the twin virtues of an inexplicable claim to being “in” and flat soles. The suckers might be hideous, but at least they didn’t hamper her movement.

  Over the jeans—or, rather, above the jeans—she wore a midriff-skimming sweater in bright pink with a label that had absolutely no claim on reality. Topping it all, her anorak of shiny silver and faux-fur trim hung open, the better to display both the occasional flashes of belly her sweater revealed and the Burberry check scarf that hung around her neck. Another knockoff, of course, but it was the check that counted around here.

  She looked as if she’d been born down the next street, meaning absolutely no one within a one-mile radius would bother looking at her twice. That was exactly how she wanted it.

  Ivy pushed through the front door and into the Friday-night crowd, feeling a surge of nostalgia for the clouds of smoke that hadn’t floated through the air of British pubs in decades. It would have lent things a certain Sherlock Holmesian air she would have appreciated. Instead, she had a clear view all the way from the tap to the back corner of the room. She could see exactly what she had come here for.

  Pasting a casual smile on her face, Ivy began to weave her way through the crowd. She might be keeping her eye on the prize, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t keeping track of the bodies around her for more than the usual reason of not running into one of them and making a fool of herself. Situational awareness had become a hard-earned skill o
f hers since she’d gotten involved in her little side business here in London, and it had come in handy on more than one occasion.

  Like now, when she tried to move past a knot of local lads cozied up to the bar.

  She had made a mental note of them earlier, when she’d been lurking in her previous camouflaged incarnation, just as she’d made a mental note of the older couples occupying several tables, the group of ladies gathered for an obvious hen night, and the middle-aged men with their attention glued to the television in the corner that broadcast a seemingly nonstop schedule of football matches. Unlike those other groups, though, Ivy had made note of the lads because she knew they were the ones most likely to cause her trouble.

  And now it appeared they didn’t want to disappoint her. How sweet.

  “Well, hello there, sweetheart. Buy you a drink?”

  The young man closest to her reached out to pinch the fabric of her coat and tug her to a stop, all the while flashing her a crooked grin he probably practiced in his bathroom mirror, thinking it made him look rakish and charming. It might have even worked had the rest of him not screamed out “yob” at the top of its lungs. She couldn’t go so far as to call him a chav (mostly due to fashion choice), but he bore the look of someone with an ASBO or five on his police record.

  She replied with a studious avoidance of eye contact and a patently false, close-lipped smile. “Thanks, no. I’m meeting someone.”

  A couple of his mates snickered into their lagers, which of course did not help her escape attempt.

  He tried another smile, but his eyes had narrowed. “Aw, don’t be like that, love. Me name’s Teddy. What’s yours, eh?”

  “Busy,” Ivy said, revoking the smile and shrugging out of his grip.

  She didn’t wait for attempt number three, just plowed forward and refocused on her goal. Good thing, too, because said goal had taken on the slight grayish pallor of incipient panic. She needed to settle him down and get their plan back on track.