Hard Breaker Page 4

  More vomiting, and he turned his head to sweep his gaze around the alley in the direction from which the sound came. To his surprise, his eyes spied not a female form but another male one, this one doubled over as it emptied the contents of its stomach onto the floor of the alley.

  “Guardian.”

  The feminine voice came from behind him, right where he had thought the woman had been. Apparently, she had not moved as he had assumed during his brief altercation, but had remained in place while he dispatched her attackers.

  He looked back toward the vomiting male and frowned. He had never seen a demon overcome by human sickness before, but he would not tolerate even a potential threat to the woman.

  Baen did not waste time analyzing that unfamiliar surge of protective instinct, but instead turned to dispatch this last little problem.

  “Guardian, wait.”

  The woman stepped forward and reached out, her fingertips just brushing the edge of one wing. The jolt of energy that surged through him at the brief contact nearly made him rock back on his heels. He had experienced nothing like it in all his long centuries of existence.

  “He’s not possessed,” the woman explained when he turned to look at her. “He’s human. Actually he’s a Warden. I was trying to get him someplace safe when the demons attacked us.”

  Her voice both surprised and intrigued him. He would have expected something lighter and sweeter to come from this small, slender creature, something to match her citrusy scent. Instead, she sounded more like vanilla or clove, dark and rich. He looked closer, his keen vision having no trouble picking her out in the dark.

  “A Warden?”

  His voice rumbled between them, naturally deep and roughened from disuse. Another human might have found it menacing, but this female did not so much as flinch.

  “Yes. Is he yours?”

  “Mine?”

  “His?”

  The last question, uttered in an indefinable style somewhere between a squeak and a groan drew both Baen’s and the woman’s attention to the male figure still hunched over a puddle of vomit farther down the alley. His expression still looked somewhat queasy, if you asked Baen.

  “Did you summon him, Martin?” the female demanded, frowning at the other human. “You didn’t tell me you were personal Warden to a Guardian! Don’t you think that’s the kind of information you should have shared?”

  “But I’m not! I swear,” Martin protested. “No one in my family has ever been assigned to a Guardian. Not in our entire history. I’ve no idea how to do a proper summoning.”

  Baen pushed away his initial surprise to examine the situation. He felt no particular connection to the scrawny male called Martin, and he certainly hadn’t been introduced to him at the end of his last Warden’s life. In fact, the last time he had been introduced to a new Warden had been a very long time ago indeed, if his instincts were correct.

  “What is your full name?” he demanded of the human, just to be certain.

  “P-P-Pickering,” the man stammered. “M-Martin Louis Pickering. Why?”

  Baen ignored the question and looked back at the woman. “My last Warden was from the house of Beauclerk. Henry Fitzallen Beauclerk.”

  She made a face indicating a good deal of displeasure. “Damn. It would have made things a hell of a lot simpler.”

  Martin finally straightened up from his bent-over position. The hands he had braced on his thighs during his bout of sickness trembled visibly until he pressed them to his stomach. The obvious sign of fear, or at least intense discomfort, inspired no sympathy in Baen. It only served to highlight the human’s weakness, and weakness was something all Guardians disdained.

  “W-why are we still standing around here?” Martin asked. “What if more of those things show up?”

  Baen curled his lip. “An army of ‘those things’ could show up and prove no more of a challenge than the three I have already dispatched.”

  “So you’re really one of them, then? A G-Guardian?”

  The human’s stutter was beginning to irritate Baen. He scowled. “Obviously.”

  Martin turned to the female and thrust a pointed finger in Baen’s direction. “Then I want him to take me to Paris. He can protect me a lot better than you can.”

  The woman nodded, her expression serious. “You’re right. He can. Besides, I’m all on my own here. The only contacts I have are anonymous and in hiding.” She turned her attention to Baen. “But I know there are Wardens in France, a good number of them. I made sure some of them got there. They need to know about you as soon as possible. You have to go to Paris with Martin. The Guild has been searching for the Guardians for a very long time.”

  That news made Baen frown. The Guild had to search for his kind? They were supposed to know exactly where he and his brethren slept at all times. After all, they were the ones who put them to sleep, and the Guild members were nothing if not meticulous recordkeepers.

  Something must be very, very wrong.

  At the moment, however, Baen had one very particular reason for not liking the citrus-scented female’s suggestion that he leave her side and escort Martin to the Guild headquarters.

  “I cannot travel to Paris with this male,” he said, folding his wings and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Why not?” Martin asked, his tone petulant. It only added to Baen’s disdain for him.

  “Why not?” the female echoed, looking unintimidated by his size or determined stance.

  “Because Martin is not my Warden,” Baen informed her, his eyes narrowing as certainty and satisfaction filled him. “You are.”

  Chapter Four

  The words hit Ivy harder than the Guardian had hit the demons. She felt it right in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her faster than a roundhouse kick to the diaphragm.

  Her? Personal Warden to one of the seven Guardians of the Light? But she wasn’t a member of the Guild.

  Hell, she wasn’t even a Warden!

  Her head shook almost of its own volition. “That’s impossible.”

  “It is truth.”

  “But you told me you weren’t from the Guild,” Martin protested. When had his voice become so nasal and annoying? she wondered. Had it always sounded like that? “You said you weren’t a Warden.”

  Ivy stamped back her irritation. Her shock felt like more than enough to deal with at the moment. “I’m not.” She blinked up at the Guardian and said with more force, “I’m not a Warden.”

  For a creature made of stone, the enormous male had no trouble conveying his thoughts through his expression. One heavy brow lifted at the corner, a clear indication of skepticism. And amusement at her expense.

  “You think this is something a Guardian would mistake?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I mean—” She broke off and shook her head. Maybe some sense would fall back in. “I’m not saying you’re not the expert on Guardians and Wardens here. I’m just saying that I think you should … reexamine your impressions. I can’t be your Warden, because I’m not a Warden. I’m not a member of the Guild. I was never even tested. I’m female.”

  The arched brow fell, joined quickly by its mate. “What significance does your gender play in your role as a Warden? You have talent. You can use magic. What else is required?”

  “Um, training, for one?” Ivy offered. She shook her head. “Besides, I can’t use magic. I’ve never performed a spell in my life.”

  His gaze, black and intense and lit with inner flames, bored into her. “But you do have talent.”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” she muttered, looking away.

  This conversation was getting way out of hand. It was bad enough that her impeccably planned mission to get Martin to safety in France had just gone sideways, but to add a demon attack on top of that was enough to throw any girl off her game. Then sprinkle in the sudden appearance of one of the seven missing Guardians, and it was a wonder she could still speak. She did not have the bandwidth to deal with the l
udicrous assertion that she was supposedly now not just a Warden, but the personal Warden to said Guardian.

  She had it hard enough processing just the mysteriously appearing Guardian part. After all, how many girls got rescued from a demonic attack by a seven-foot-tall gargoyle with superstrength?

  Um, one, apparently. Lucky her?

  Oh, it’s not like she didn’t feel grateful that she was still breathing rather than decorating the digestive tracts of three creatures of the Darkness. She preferred life to death by a fairly significant margin, but that didn’t mean she didn’t deserve a few minutes to get a grip on the situation. For Pete’s sake, she had barely had time to get a good look at the Guardian, and now he was trying to tell her she had been ordained by Fate as his magical P.A.? Did he think her degree came from Hogwarts? Because that would be a hell of a shock to her parents and the student loan people who had sent all that money to SUNY instead.

  Not, of course, that getting a good look at him helped.

  The alley boasted pretty poor lighting, but after all this time, her eyes had adjusted well enough to make out the basics of the Guardian’s physique. He looked as if Smaug the dragon and a male model had managed to conceive a love child. Only, you know, hotter.

  His height wasn’t the only reason the Guardian gave the impression of blocking out the streetlights with his size. His shoulders looked like they’d have trouble squeezing through a standard doorway—a standard American doorway. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise her if he had to twist sideways to make it. And every inch of the man rippled with muscle, the dense, heavy kind that should have made him look slow and lumbering. Instead, it just made him look deadly, like he could crush a Volkswagen microbus the way normal men could crush a beer can.

  No way could he be mistaken for normal, or even human. Sure, he wore the same basic shape—one head, two arms, two legs—but the gigantic dragon wings protruding from his back offered the first little clue. Then there were the horns that swept back from just above his temples and curved gracefully into skyward points. Deadly points. They made the Minotaur look like a poncy git.

  Hell, compared to the Guardian, entire mythological pantheons looked like poncy gits. Including the ones that demanded human sacrifice.

  I can think of one or two things I’d like to sacrifice to him, a voice inside her purred. Ivy nearly jumped out of her skin. WTF? Where had that thought come from? Since when was she the kind of girl who dropped her panties at the first sight of some hard biceps and a visible six-pack?

  Try eight-pack. Rrawr!

  Down, girl!

  Ivy pinched herself discreetly. Now was not the time to get distracted. Not even by her own libido. Maybe she should focus on something like those three-inch-long claws of his. Those did not look like the sort of things she wanted anywhere near her tender bits.

  Luckily for her, a sound leaked into the alley and offered the best distraction she could have hoped for. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Martin asked. As if he were still part of the conversation.

  The Guardian just stared at her. “I hear many things.”

  He probably did, too. Guardians were known for their keen senses—vision, hearing, and smell all said to be dozens of times more acute than the average human’s. He could probably hear automobiles rumbling down nearby streets, hear the noisy crowd gathered at the pub they had been at earlier, even hear a baby crying in a flat a couple of streets away. But even if he could hear all of it, there was only one sound that mattered to Ivy just then.

  “The siren. Do you hear a siren?”

  His head pulled back a bit and a look of confusion settled over his handsome, mostly human face. “Singing? Here?”

  Now it was her turn to look at him as if he’d just switched to speaking a foreign language. It took a second before her brain processed the confusion over words with more than one meaning. Honestly, though, did he think she had really started babbling about mermaids in modern London? Especially at a time like this.

  “Not that kind of siren. Police sirens.”

  His expression cleared. “Ah, mechanical devices that produce audible warning signals. Yes. One has been drawing closer for a couple of minutes.”

  “Thank God!” Martin cried.

  Ivy wanted to smack him. “‘Thank God’?” she repeated. “Are you insane? We’re standing in an alley with three dead bodies and a damned gargoyle. Do you think the police are coming to help you, Martin? Don’t be an idiot. We need to get out of here before we wind up in jail on suspicion of murder.”

  The Warden got a stubborn look on his face that made Ivy’s own heart sink. “Maybe jail is the safest place for me at the moment. Did you ever think of that? There’s no way to make the last train across the Channel at this rate, and you’ve already shown me what kind of protection you can offer me. If the Guardian isn’t going to keep me safe, maybe the police will.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. First, the police are not going to be in the right frame of mind to listen when you tell them you didn’t just kill the three people lying at your feet with various fatal injuries. And second, the Darkness just got to you—almost killed you—by possessing three random dudes we ran into in a pub in Croydon. What the hell makes you think it can’t get you by possessing someone at the local police station? Glass-half-full optimism?”

  She saw her words hit him, saw him digest them like a bit of leftover curry that might or might not have gone off during its time in the fridge. At any other time, she might have felt a stirring of sympathy for the man. He was in danger, after all. He had been forced into hiding by circumstances that were no fault of his own, and when someone had finally appeared offering to get him to safety, had promised him they had almost reached it, the rug had been pulled out from under him again and safety now likely appeared to be farther out of reach than ever before. She’d probably be feeling a bit sullen about the whole thing, too, if she were in his shoes.

  But she wasn’t. She still wore these stupid, fashion-victim boots, and she’d be damned if she’d wear them in her very first mug shot, whether they’d be out of frame or not.

  “The source of the siren is coming closer,” the Guardian informed them helpfully. “I estimate it will reach us in fewer than four minutes.”

  Ivy cursed. “Martin, we have to go. Now. I promise that I will find a way to keep you safe in the long term, but from right now, all three of us need to get moving. Together. Let the Guardian protect you for now. Just until we get somewhere that won’t land us in a cell. All right?”

  “Three minutes.”

  She shot the Guardian a withering glare. What was he? Her frickin’ alarm clock?

  Martin dithered for another few seconds (this was worse than having to pee in the middle of an urban traffic jam) before he finally gave a brief nod. “Fine. Where do we go?”

  “I know someplace we can hole up, out of the way and where no one will be looking for either of us. Any of us,” she corrected, looking at the Guardian, “but first we have to get away from here without being seen. I think the back of this alley connects to the mews at the back of a row of town houses on the next block. If we can sneak through there, we might be able to blend in with the crowd on the high street, but I’m not sure our new friend here is really blendable.”

  “We don’t have time,” the Guardian said. “The police will reach us before we are out of range of their hearing. Besides, I have a better idea.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  “Hang on.”

  She would have demanded clarification—probably in a rather snippy tone of voice, if she were honest—but in the space of the next heartbeat, she was too busy biting back a shriek of surprise to bother. The Guardian had grabbed her around the waist, wrapped his other arm around Martin’s skinny frame, and launched himself into the night sky.

  Cold air rushed over her, past her, as the Guardian carried them over the tops of the buildings surrounding the alley, seemingly unconcerned by the weight of his twi
n passengers, let alone by the distance between the three of them and the very, extremely, hazardously hard ground below them.

  “Are you insane?” Ivy hissed after her brain and mouth started working again. She felt a little embarrassed about how long that actually took—long enough for the Guardian to skim across at least three blocks’ worth of rooftops. “You can’t just fly us off into the sunset, Gibraltar. What the hell are you thinking?”

  “I am called Baen,” he informed her, “and the sun clearly set a significant time ago.”

  “It was a figure of speech. I meant that before you grab people and remove them from a given location, it’s generally a good idea to obtain their consent. Right, Martin?”

  “The male is unconscious. I do not believe he possesses a liking for heights.”

  Ivy wasn’t exactly wild about them either, but she wasn’t about to faint. While she knew she was being uncharitable, she couldn’t stop her brain from labeling the passed-out Warden with a scoffing, mental “Wuss.”

  She also couldn’t stop herself from using his state to bolster her argument. “Really? Maybe he just objects to being kidnapped by an airborne bully. Or he would have preferred to have a bloody destination in mind. Were you planning to just fly around the skies above London until you caused a city-wide UFO panic?”

  The Guardian didn’t bother to answer. Instead he touched down on the roof of a building with surprising lightness for his massive frame. Then he set Ivy carefully onto her feet and lowered Martin to slump against a chimney stack. When he straightened, he fixed her with that burning black gaze of his, one that didn’t match his bland expression.

  “You expressed urgency in removing ourselves from the alley before the human authorities discovered us there. As the arrival of the police became imminent, it seemed prudent to ensure our anonymity. Forgive me for pointing it out, but you and the male could not have moved with sufficient speed to avoid capture and questioning by the police. I merely acted in accordance with your wishes and with the best interests of all of us in mind.”