Jim stood up, the hackles between its shoulders standing on end as it gave a low-pitched warning growl. I stared in surprise at Jim for a second. It had never growled before, not even when various people were trying to kill me.
Catalina stopped, waves of hostility rolling off her. I wondered what I had done that set her so against me. “The mortal has a demon. How fitting.”
My hackles rose at the tone in her voice. I sat up straighter, aware that Drake moved closer until his leg was pressed against my arm. “Do not, Mother,” Drake said, the note of warning back in his voice.
Her eyes narrowed on him. She spat out something that had me flinching, even though I didn’t understand it. “You dare to criticize me? You made this choice, Drake. You cannot blame me or anyone else for having this response to your slap in the face of dragon tradition.”
“Tradition has been broken in the past and survived,” he said somewhat cryptically.
“Cabrón!”
I pursed my lips. I knew from watching Spanish-speaking TV that Drake’s mother had just called him a bastard.
“A backhanded insult if ever there was one,” he replied, releasing my shoulder to walk over to her. She was a tall woman, both taller and bigger than me, but not as tall as Drake. He loomed over her in a menacing fashion. “Are you finished, or is there a bit more bile you wish to work out?”
“You are as abominable as your father,” she snarled, her face tight with fury. “The day I was cursed with you both I fell to my knees and begged the Virgin to take me! I would have rather had my heart ripped out from my chest than know that my son, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, would shame me in this way!”
Drake had evidently had enough. His face was almost as dark as his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Mother! I have mated with a mortal woman, not a goat! There is no disgrace in Aisling being human.”
“Tradition—”
“Can go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” Drake bellowed, startling everyone in the room.
It had an interesting effect on his mother. She stood still for a moment, then suddenly smiled, satisfaction positively dripping off her. “There is more of me in you than of your accursed father.”
I watched in utter surprise as she leaned forward and kissed Drake on the cheek. She gave me a narrow-eyed look that was downright frightening, then turned on her heel and left the room without another word.
The silence that filled her absence was almost deafening.
Drake looked at me. “You are no doubt expecting an explanation.”
“Oh, yes. About a whole lot of things, but foremost why your mother took such an instant and all-encompassing dislike to me. What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing. She has a volatile temper and is happiest when raging about something or other. She evidently decided to pick a minor point in dragon dogma to use as an outlet for her latest tantrum.”
I allowed him to pull me to my feet. My legs were still a bit boneless after our romp in bed, the fire inside me banked but not quenched. I leaned up against him, inhaling the wonderfully Drake scent that never failed to make me shiver with delight. “You’re talking about that thing where wyverns have one human parent, right? So she’s upset that rather than take a dragon mate so one of your kids will be a wyvern, you picked me?”
“I didn’t exactly pick you,” he said, escorting me through the hall to a side passage. “It just turned out that way.”
“Well, you know—” I started to say but stopped when my name was called. I hurried back into the main hall. Nora raced down the stairs from the upper floor, her bag of Guardian things in her hand.
“Pál, would you watch Paco for me? Normally I take him with me, but this time he might be considered a snack. Aisling—oh, there you are. Come quickly; there are blight hounds in the tube station.”
“Blight hounds? Oh. Sure. Gotcha.” I grabbed my purse and started after her. “Jim, heel!”
“I really hate it when you do that,” my demon grumbled, shambling after me. “I may look like a fabulously handsome and intelligent dog, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to act like one!”
“Pál will accompany you,” Drake said in a bossy voice, standing in the middle of the hall with his hands on his hips.
Nora paused and sent me a curious look. I stopped at the door and looked back at Drake. Here we were just settled back together, and already the terms of our relationship were being tested. “Thank you, but we’ll be fine.”
“I would be happier if Pál—”
I interrupted him before he could continue. “This is our business, remember?”
“Yes, it is. However, you just agreed to allow me to protect you in situations where you might be in danger.”
I took a deep breath and tried to phrase carefully what I needed to say. “Just as I trust you to not let me screw up dragon things, I trust Nora to keep me from a situation with beings I can’t handle. I’ve read about blight hounds, and I’m prepared to help her with them. They aren’t that dangerous, and I’ll have Jim and Nora with me. So thank you for offering Pál’s assistance, thank you for caring enough to want to shield me, but we’ll be fine on our own.”
An interesting parade of expressions passed across Drake’s face.
I ran across the floor to him, putting my hands on his chest as I leaned into him. “Trust goes both ways, Drake. You have to learn to trust that I know what I’m doing.”
“It’s not your abilities I doubt,” he said slowly, his eyes dark. “It is not easy to let you go in this manner.”
“I know it’s not. But it’ll get easier. OK?”
The anger on his face faded into annoyance, which did a brief tango with stubbornness, and finally morphed into resignation.
I gave him a swift kiss. “That was a hell of a battle you fought, but I appreciate your faith in me.”
“I have always had faith in you, kincsem. It is all others I distrust.” His eyes were like molten emeralds.
I smiled. “We’ll work on that, too. Don’t worry; Nora and I will be back soon.”
“You had better be,” he grumbled, giving Nora a significant look.
“I never thought you’d be able to pull that off, but you know, you just may end up getting what you want with him,” Jim said a few minutes later as we hurried down the cement steps into the belly of the Underground station located two blocks from Drake’s house. It was commuter hour, which meant the station was swarming with people entering and leaving. The distant rumble of trains echoed down the long tile corridors, dimmed by the sounds of commuters.
Before I could answer Jim, in the distance a high-pitched howl rose above the din, making every hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I muttered to myself, keeping a firm grip on both my purse and Jim’s leash.
“Tell me what you know of blight hounds,” Nora said in between apologies scattered left and right as she pushed her way through the crowd.
I rustled around in my memory for the snippets I’d read about them a few nights past. “They’re small beasts resembling hyenas, often used as a familiar to cast a curse on a location or structure. They generally serve demons but can…ow! Pardon me, sir; would you mind moving your paddle? Thank you.” I limped past a man who held a kayak paddle, rubbing my abused shin.
Nora sped around a corner, leaped a barrier intended to keep the public out of a transit employees–only area, and disappeared down a long, unlit hallway. I hurdled the barrier after her.
“Go on.” Her voice called back eerily from the darkness.
I ran almost blind, one hand out to keep from smashing into something. “They can be summoned by a knowledgeable practitioner of the dark powers.”
A dim yellow glow at the end of the disused hallway showed Nora’s form as she paused in an archway.
I leaped over a pile of disused signs, running the last few feet to her. “They are not generally considered dangerous unless found in great numbers, which seldom happens since
they tend to fight with each other.”
Nora said nothing as she peered over the railing to the floor below. I stepped forward to look. We were on an overpass perched above two disused platforms, dusty and dirty and evidently now used for storage of miscellaneous office equipment. Over the broken chairs, scuffed and stained metal desks, and naked metal racks once used in administrative offices, a good hundred and fifty or so fox-sized red-and-black forms crawled, snarling and yipping at each other as they milled around. “Oh, dear.”
“This may be a little bit more involved than I originally anticipated,” Nora said slowly, her eyes on the seething mass of blight hounds.
“You want I should go back and get that guy’s paddle?” Jim asked me.
“Huh?”
Its lips pulled back in a smile. “From where I’m sitting, we’re up a creek without one.”
“We’ll start on the left side and work right,” Nora said, trotting across the overpass. “Use your wards to slow down any of them who rush you. Remember the three steps of dispatching.”
“Halt, bind, and destroy,” I said, following her.
“Exactly. Stay behind me, but don’t let any stragglers escape past you.”
“Gotcha. Jim, what’s the policy on a demon attacking demon minions?”
“We’re go for launch,” it panted as it ran after us.
“Great, so you don’t have any issues with helping me wipe them out?”
We stopped short of the platform, the nearest blight hounds about ten feet away. “Not a one. I never liked blight hounds. They have no sense of humor to speak of.”
“OK, but how will you dispatch them?”
“With lots of slobber?” Jim grinned at me as I drew a protective ward over myself. It gave a mock sigh as I narrowed my eyes. “They’re demonic, Aisling. If I destroy their physical forms, they will be sent back to Abaddon. I’ll just do a little neck snapping, and back they go.”
“Ew. No details; just do it.” I slung my bag over my back and unsnapped Jim’s leash, freeing up both my hands to draw wards.
Nora looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.
“Let’s do it,” I told her. “Effrijim, I command thee to wipe out the blight hounds!”
Jim gave a little battle cry as it ran forward into the mass of snarling bodies. Nora followed, her voice raised as she started clearing a path with a couple of high-level incantations.
The next hour and a half was grueling, exhausting, and draining on all levels—and I loved every minute of it.
“Now this is what I’m talking about!” I did a little victory dance as I dispatched the last blight hound, its body turning into a puff of nasty-smelling black smoke that hung heavily in the air. I twirled around to make sure that there were no more little nasties hiding anywhere, but Nora had rousted out the last of them. “Woohoo, we rock!”
Jim collapsed next to an overturned table, its tongue lolling to the ground as it panted, giving me an intolerant look. “Jeez, woman, get a grip. It was just a few blight hounds, not the princes of Abaddon themselves.”
I jumped over a stack of boxes containing clunky dot-matrix printers, pausing to give Jim a well-deserved pat on the head. “Cut me a little slack, OK? It was my first official infestation, and I’m celebrating. How did I do, Nora? I felt good. I felt in control, and even when that big herd rushed me and I got a little frenzied with the binding wards—sorry about freezing you, Jim, that was totally unintentional—it didn’t take me long to get the situation back under control.”
Nora poked a stack of discarded furniture to make sure no blight hounds remained, straightening up to dust off her hands and smile. “You did very well, as a matter of fact. You kept your head despite overwhelming circumstances.”
Even though I was filthy with dirt from the abandoned platform, and covered in demon smoke grit, I glowed with happiness from her praise.
“There is the little matter of the fire,” she added, hesitating.
“I put that right out. As soon as I saw the furniture on fire, I doused the flame.” A pang of guilt zinged through me as I glanced down the platform where the charred bits of rubble remained, the wall now stained black with smoke.
“Yes, you did.” Nora continued to hesitate. I stood before her, anxious to know how my first outing as a Guardian trainee had gone, worried by her obvious reluctance to speak.
“But?” I prodded her, my heart sinking as her smile faded.
“That wasn’t actually the fire I was speaking about.” She looked uncomfortable for a moment, which made me feel even more uneasy. “Are you aware that when you draw a ward, you invoke dragon fire?”
I frowned, mentally going over the ward-drawing process. “No, I wasn’t. I draw the pattern you showed me, add my own little bit, and imbue it with my belief in my powers and abilities, just as you told me. I don’t see where it is I’m drawing on Drake’s fire.”
She pointed at rat that peeked out from under a stack of garbage. “Draw a binding ward on that rat.”
“OK.” I took a deep breath, focused, and drew a symbol in the air that would, when combined with my force of will, bind the rat to the spot.
The ward glowed red in the air for a second, then faded into nothing. The rat gave a squeak of surprise as it tried to scurry away. I started to turn away, but a slight flicker caught my eye. To my surprise, fire suddenly flared to life in the form of the ward I’d just drawn, sending the rat beneath it into a frenzy of horror.
“Oh, my god!” I ran over, ignoring my dislike of rodents to snatch the rat out of harm’s way, swatting out the fire after I released the terrified rat. “I had no idea! I didn’t see any fire with the blight hounds but the one on the furniture…”
“I believe it manifests itself when you cement the ward with your will,” she mused, giving me a thoughtful look. “By the time you’ve done that and the fire manifests, you’ve moved on to the next being demanding your attention.”
I glanced back at the charred wood. “Ugh. Now I’m a pyromaniac.”
“Nothing so serious, although you will probably want to learn how to empower your wards without drawing on fire.”
Jim snorted. “As if.”
I didn’t say anything as I followed Nora and Jim out of the tube station. Jim’s words echoed in my head with worrisome intensity. What if my demon was right? What if I couldn’t draw a ward without pulling on Drake’s fire? I struggled with the need to keep the Guardian part of myself separate from Drake.
If I couldn’t do this on my own, what did that say about my abilities?
12
“Salut. You would like a ride, yes?”
We stopped at the top of the stairs that led down into the tube station. Next to us, blithely parked in a tow-away zone, a man sat smiling at us from the confines of a black taxi.
I wasn’t surprised to see him any more than I was to see he’d acquired a new taxi. “Hi, Rene. We’re only a couple of blocks from our new home, but sure, a ride would be nice. And maybe if you have the time, you can come in and say hi to Drake and his men.”
Nora greeted Rene and happily climbed into the taxi after Jim.
“It would be my pleasure, but is that not one of Drake’s men there? Perhaps he would like to join you?” Rene nodded toward the doorway of a small art gallery.
I turned to look. I didn’t see Pál or István. “One of Drake’s men?”
“I cannot be certain, not having met all of them, but I did see a dragon slip into the gallery. I assumed he was watching you.”
“Dammit, Drake agreed to trust me…. I’ll be right back. Just let me go tell whichever of them it is that the jig’s up, and we’ll go home.” I marched into the gallery, mentally rehearsing the righteously indignant lecture I would give Drake. A quick scan of the main room showed it dragonless. I hurried through the other three, smaller, rooms, but none of them held anything but browsing artists and patrons.
It really wasn’t worth pursuing Pál or István just to tell them I knew they were fol
lowing me, but my pride was irked. Probably they’d seen me come into the gallery and were hiding from me…which irked me even more. After checking to make sure no one was around to see me, I slipped through a door marked PRIVATE and found myself in an apparently empty office.
I walked into the room, my hands on my hips. “All right, I know you’re in here; you can stop…oh, god.”
An odd whooshing noise interrupted me, but it was the sharp blow of pain in my back and odd burning feeling in my stomach that had me looking down.
The long, curved blade of a sword emerged from my front.
“Holy shit,” I swore, my brain shocked into numbness as I tried to absorb the fact that there was a sword sticking through me.
A voice behind me snarled something in a guttural language. I spun around and was knocked backwards by a blow to the face. I managed to twist and land on my side rather than my back, some instinct of preservation keeping me from driving the sword any farther through my body.
Above me stood a dragon, all right. But it wasn’t one of Drake’s men. This dragon was Chinese and wore a black leather jacket with a red bandanna tied around his face. In his left hand he held a starlike spiky weapon that he aimed at my heart.
“No!” I shrieked at the red dragon, frantically trying to roll out of the way. The blade sticking through me made it difficult to move. My mind was shrieking all sorts of warnings and orders, all of them conflicting and sending me quickly toward a full-fledged panic attack. With a desperation born of frenzy, I opened the door in my head, pulling on Drake’s fire to give me strength. A fireball the likes of which I had never seen formed in front of me and hurled at the red dragon.
It was then I realized my mistake. Fighting a dragon with fire was like adding gasoline to a blaze. The dragon laughed for a moment, then absorbed the fire and lifted his hand to throw the weapon at me. I cursed my foolishness, hurling a chair at him as I dragged my wounded self behind the safety of the desk. The dragon said something in Chinese, destroying the chair with a couple of deft moves.
I started drawing a binding ward on him, hoping to slow him down so I could get out of the room and get some help, but I didn’t finish it before he grabbed me by my hair and yanked me up next to him.