Chapter Three

For a moment, the only sounds Fil could make out were the chirps of insects and the beating of her own heart. Then Ella let out a deep breath and whispered into the phone.

“He’s awake, isn’t he?”

Fil felt a flush of irritation. Since Ella couldn’t see her, she glared at Spar instead, which was almost as good.

“Yes, Ella. He’s awake. He’s not logically possible, of course, but he’s up and moving, his name is Spar, apparently, and a few minutes ago he grabbed me and flew me across the city to what looks like one of the islands in the Saint Lawrence. So now might be a pretty good time to tell me what the hell is going on around here.”

“This is really a conversation we should have in person.”

“Well, I’m not exactly in a position to fly to BC at the moment, pal, so unless you happen to be paying an impromptu visit to my fair city, ‘in person’ is not going to happen. Now spill.”

She heard a rustling noise, then what sounded like a muffled conversation in the background. After a moment, her friend came back with, “I need to see you, and there are things you need to see on my end, too. How soon can you get to a computer with Skype?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, El, and I’m using a smartphone. You want to video chat, we can do that right here.”

“All right. I’ll call you right back.”

The call disconnected, and Fil blew out a breath of frustration. “This is not the night I signed up for,” she muttered, staring at her phone and waiting for the video call to come in.

“You are taking a telephone call?”

Spar asked the question in an even tone, but Fil could feel the disapproval behind the words, even if she hadn’t been able to see the faint shadings of irritation in his aura.

“It’s not like I’m chatting with my sorority sister about the latest style trends,” she snapped. “Ella is the one who sent me looking for you in the first place, and it’s becoming pretty damned clear she knew something about you before she did. Frankly, she owes me some downright heavy-duty explanations right about now.”

He folded his arms over his chest and settled farther down on his haunches. “Your friend knows of my kind. Is she a Warden?”

“A what-den?”

“A member of the Guild,” he added, as if that clarified things.

Fil rolled her eyes. “Two species separated by a common language,” she paraphrased under her breath. She nearly jumped when the phone in her hand chimed again. This time, when she answered the call, Ella’s familiar face filled the screen.

“Okay, El,” she bit out, staring into her friend’s troubled gray eyes. “Now would be a really good time to tell me what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is going on here.”

“I will, Fil, I promise. But first there’s something you need to see.”

Before Felicity could protest, Ella shifted out of the picture and the camera panned over to focus on someone else. Or rather, something else.

The image on the screen halted Fil’s breath in her throat. An angelic male face peered back at her with eyes blacker than pitch, lit from behind with a thousand fires. They made Fil think of lava flows, molten-red in the cracks, but topped with a crust of obsidian.

The eyes were set in a face that looked as if it had been carved from granite, and if that wasn’t enough for her to make the connection, the skin like stone and the horns curving back from the rugged brow would have tipped her off. The man on the screen could have been Spar’s brother. In fact, Fil would have bet a year of her life that was exactly who he was.

“His name is Kees.” Ella’s voice came from out of frame, but Fil had no trouble making out the words. “He’s a—”

“A Guardian,” Fil finished, feeling grim. “Let me guess. Could he possibly be the ‘statue’ that was supposedly stolen from the Vancouver Museum of Art and History just a few short weeks ago?”

Ella shifted back into the picture, sharing the space with the enormous creature beside her. Something in the way the woman leaned against the Guardian’s massive chest sent a stirring of something through Fil, but she ignored it. She had bigger things to worry about right now.

“He is,” Ella confirmed with a nod. “But I think you know by now that Kees was never a statue. Not really. He was just sleeping.”

“Yeah, it sounds like there was a lot of that going around.” She sighed and shook her head. “Well, let me be the one to get the reunion started. Kees, this is Spar. Spar, I have a feeling you know Kees.”

Fil handed the phone to the creature beside her. Another time, she might have laughed at the way his giant hands fumbled with the small piece of technology, but her head had begun to ache way too much to risk it. The way she felt right now, the damned thing might explode on her at the smallest chuckle.

Spar scowled down into the screen, moving the phone back and forth toward his face as if trying to zoom in the picture. “Kees? Is that you, my brother?”

“It is,” the other Guardian snarled. “For the sake of the Light, will you hold still before you make us both dizzy?”

“You look so small. I can hardly see that it is you. Why do you not come closer so that I might view you more easily?”

“I am on the other side of the continent at the moment, my friend,” Kees explained. “What you see is a transmission of my image. This technology is new to you, I take it. When was the last time you woke?”

“They told me the year was 1789. A great human slaughter began that fed one of the Seven too well. It began to stir, and I was summoned to send it back to its prison.”

“I trust you succeeded, for I was never called to aid you. Were any of the others?”

“Of course not. I handled it myself, as I was charged to do.” Fil watched as Spar’s expression grew even more fierce. “What is the meaning of this, brother? Why have both of us awoken together? Why have I awoken at all? I cannot feel the presence of one of the Seven. The Darkness poses no immediate threat of escape from its shackles. So what is going on?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Fil stepped forward and laid her hand over Spar’s, directing the camera until it captured both of their images. “I don’t care who explains it to me, El, you or your pal there, but I definitely want to know what’s going on and why my new reality has to stretch to include talking statues and terms like the Darkness, with a capital D.”

“It’s a really long story.”

Fil glanced at the clock on her phone and raised an eyebrow. “Well, El, it’s two twenty-seven in the morning, and I seem to be sitting the middle of a provincial park with a creature out of a book of fairy tales, so quite frankly I can’t think of anyplace else I need to be at the moment. Start talking.”

*   *   *

Spar watched the human female—Fil, her friend had called her, though he found the masculine name ridiculous—as she listened to her friend relate the story of his kind. He found her face fascinating. Each of her thoughts passed over it in succession. Perhaps it was the purity of her features that made them so easy to read, for she had the finely drawn look of a Madonna: small, straight nose, clear brow, rounded cheeks, and a mouth like Cupid’s bow. Her skin could pass for porcelain in the faint illumination of her mobile phone, and her wide green eyes bore a fringe of lashes a hundred shades darker than her pale-blond hair. She looked like walking innocence. Of course, Spar acknowledged to himself, when she opened her mouth she sounded like something entirely different.

He studied her while the one called Ella repeated a familiar tale. Thousands of years ago in the face of great evil, a group of powerful magic users—mages—banded together to summon forth a power capable of defeating the demons who formed the Darkness. Seven immortal warriors were called, one for each of the demons they would combat, and the mages named them the Guardians, because their purpose was to guard humanity from the servants of evil.

The mages quickly learned, however, that the Seven demons of the Darkness could not be entirely destroyed. They were formed from the Dark itself, and so would exist forever in the same way that the Light would exist forever. In order to contain them, they were separated from one another to prevent them from feeding on one another’s power, and each was banished to a desolate plane where they were imprisoned.

Knowing of the potential for the Seven to return, the mages made the decision to remain united and form the Guild of Wardens in order to monitor the ongoing threat from the Darkness. They gathered and shared knowledge of the enemy, assisted the Guardians with tools and support needed to battle, and monitored the activities of humans seduced or enslaved by Dark powers. The Wardens bore the ultimate responsibility for alerting the Guardians when they needed to rise and face a renewed threat, and they also acted to send the warriors back to sleep when the threat was vanquished. Even during those periods of slumber, the Guild remained vigilant against the forces of the Darkness.

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Ella concluded, “but Kees and I have discovered a problem. A big one.”

“We believe the nocturnis have developed a new strategy,” Kees explained. “Ella and I discovered that over a year ago, a fire destroyed the headquarters of the Guild of Wardens in Paris. Twenty-three of the members, including most of the inner council, died in the blaze.”

Shock tore Spar’s attention from the intriguing human to his brother’s image on the small screen. “Impossible. You are mistaken, brother. Fire could never destroy those who can shape it to their will.”

Kees set his jaw. “It can if Dark magic fans the flames. The human authorities were eager to label the fire accidental, the fault of antiquated wiring in a historic building, but you and I know that such accidents do not befall the Wardens. We know the nocturnis must have been behind it. But that is not the end of the story.

“When I awoke in this time, I tried to seek out my own Warden,” Kees continued, “the descendant of the family that served at my side for more than a thousand years. Ella and I found that he, too, had been murdered.”

A chill of foreboding and the heat of rage clashed in Spar’s chest. “You believe the nocturnis are hunting the members of the Guild.”

“We know they are.” Ella’s voice sounded grim and touched with pain. “We managed to track down one remaining Warden in the northwestern United States, and he confirmed our suspicions. For at least the past five years, the Guild has been aware of an increase in the activity of minor fiends all over the world. It was clear that the Order was behind it all.”

Fil interrupted with a frown. “The Order?”

“The Order of Eternal Darkness,” Ella said. “It’s the formal name for the group we refer to as the nocturnis. The Guild discovered that the Order had been making a vast push to expand, not just inducting members into its established sects, but founding new ones as well. Dozens of them. Maybe more. They monitored the situation, of course, but they waited too long to act, because that’s when the Wardens began dying.”

Spar uttered an oath in a language that had been dead more than a thousand years. It didn’t help.

“Go on,” he bit out. Hearing the story stabbed at him like a poisoned blade, but he needed to hear it. He needed to know the extent of the threat he faced, because this, he reasoned, must be the summons that had awoken him.

“The first few to die looked like accidents.” Kees picked up the thread and continued. “Even though the casualties always seemed to be Wardens without immediate successors in place, the need to replace them never seemed quite urgent enough to worry anyone. Until Gregory Lascaux.”

The bite of fury underlying his brother’s tone provided the key to Spar’s memory. Names could change over the centuries, but in this case he didn’t think coincidence played a part.

“The Lascaux family once belonged to you,” he said, watching Kees’s expression in the phone. The mixture of anger and grief confirmed his suspicions.

“They did. Gregory was my personal Warden, though we met few times during his tenure. I thought things were too peaceful to need my attention. Instead I woke to find that the nocturnis had developed a new strategy to defeat us, one that involved dismantling our support network in order to weaken us.”

Spar growled, long and low. It took concentration to keep his rage in check, especially when each new revelation landed like fuel on a blazing fire. “A cowardly plan that suits the craven nature of the corrupt ones. But they must realize even if destroying the Guild weakens us, we will still wake if the Seven stir. Not if every Warden on the earth were to die could a Guardian sleep through that.”

“Maybe that’s what made them decide to try to blow you up tonight while you were asleep.”

Fil’s words rang out like a bell in the silence. They cut through the thick blanket of anger and speculation and jabbed at Spar like an icy shard of truth.

He and Kees both turned to fix their gazes on her face, and he heard Ella curse softly in the background.

“Damn it, I was really hoping we were wrong about that,” the woman said. “Fil, are you sure? Was there a bomb? Is that what happened tonight? Did someone deliberately try to blow up Spar? You have to tell us everything.”

“Oh, there was a bomb all right. In fact, I think I might still have pieces of it in my hair.”

Fil—oh, how Spar hated that name—reached up and ran a palm over her hair, then tugged at the long tail in which it was bound. He ignored the way his own fingers itched to follow the same path.

“I saw it as well,” he said, at least partly to distract himself. “I am not well versed in such incendiary devices, but from the information I have absorbed from my Wardens through the years, I believe it was indeed a bomb.”

“A pipe bomb, but a pretty damned powerful one.”

“And the human who carried it was without a doubt a member of the Order. A fully inducted one. He wore one of their robes.”

Kees cursed, and Fil eyed him curiously.

“There are levels of membership in evil?” she asked.

“The nocturnis go through training and indoctrination much as those who join the Guild would do,” Spar said. “Their members might be evil inherently, but they are not born knowing how to channel the Darkness. It must be taught.”

“Fair enough.”

“Fil, you saw the guy, too, right? Are you certain he was targeting Spar?”

“He said he was. I mean, the guy was a stone cold babbling nutcase, El. He had diarrhea of the psychosis, or something. I think he was mostly talking to himself, but he said someone had told him to ‘smash the Guardian.’ Of course, I had no idea what he meant, and my being there must have distracted him. He obviously didn’t expect me to be there, and once he spotted me he seemed more concerned with coming after me than setting the bomb.”

“Did he say who gave him his instructions?”

Fil shook her head. “No, not that I remember. Not a name anyway. I think he called him by a title, though. Um … ‘the Hierophant,’ maybe?”

Ella frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”

Spar heard his fellow warrior hiss and knew Kees understood exactly what that meant, just as he did. Their eyes met in the video screen, and neither one looked pleased.

“Hierophant is a title,” Kees confirmed. “It is given to the highest-ranking priest in the Order. In other words, if this cultist was sent by the Hierophant, it means he was ordered to destroy Spar by the head of the entire nocturnis.”

“Why do you look worried by that?” Fil asked. “I thought you said you guys were immortal, and since Spar not only flew away from the blast in tip-top shape, but carried me with him while he did it, clearly a little bomb is not the way to get rid of one of you. Right?”

Kees shook his head. “Immortal does not mean invulnerable. We can be destroyed, though to do so is not easy. The problem is that we are at our most vulnerable while locked in our sleeping forms. That is one of the reasons why each Guardian was appointed a personal Warden, so that he would have someone watching his back during his slumber. While we sleep, our bodies react much like the stone we resemble. If that stone is broken to pieces, our essence is released from this plane and we cease to exist in this world.”

“That’s why knowing the nocturnis have been bumping off the Wardens has us so freaked out,” Ella said. “Not only is losing them a blow to our knowledge base, but with the Guild destroyed the Guardians become more and more vulnerable. At first, the destruction of the headquarters helped us—by burning out the library there, the nocturnis also destroyed any records of the last known locations of the seven Guardians. Still, they can’t stay hidden forever. We’ve been trying to locate the other six—well, the other five now—in the hope that we can wake them up before the Order gets to them. Awake, a Guardian is next to impossible to kill, at least for anything less powerful than one of the Seven. While they’re asleep, though, it’s a whole different ball game.”

Spar watched while understanding tightened Fil’s features. She looked fierce when she grasped the gravity of the situation.

“So the fact that this Hierophant dude sent one of his evil minions to the abbey to off Spar means that the Order knew where he was.” She nodded and fixed her friend with a sharp gaze. “Do you think they know where to find the others?”

“We have no real way of knowing,” Ella said. “I hope not, because we’re having a heck of a time finding them ourselves. Kees and I have made that our top priority, but without records it’s slow going. We’ve been following leads to a few surviving Guild members in the hope that some of them will have information, but most of them have gone into hiding. They don’t want the nocturnis to find them, and we’re paying for that right alongside the bad guys.”

Fil’s eyes narrowed, and Spar noticed her knuckles turning white where she continued to grip the blanket around her shoulders. He could detect no real anger in her expression, but he could see a hint of suspicion and something else that tugged at him down in his gut. Something like vulnerability.

“You say ‘we’ pretty easily there, El.” He had noticed the way she used her friend’s shortened name when she expected a displeasing response. “How exactly did you say you got mixed up in all this anyway? You didn’t forget to mention someone tried to blow you up, too, did you?”

The camera showed the other couple exchanging a meaningful look before Ella turned back to answer. Spar did not miss the way his brother laid his hand over the human’s shoulder, as if offering his strength, and he had a feeling Fil didn’t, either.

“No, no bombs on this end, but it’s kind of a long story. Let’s just say that I accidentally managed to wake up Kees, which confused him almost as much as it confused me. I offered to help him locate his Warden, and by the time we found out Gregory was dead … Well.” The woman shrugged. “By then, I was already in it up to my eyeballs, so it seemed a little late to try to bury my head in the sand.”

Spar could practically see the gears turning in his little human’s head as she connected the dots between what Ella had just revealed and the rest of the information her friend had recently dumped on her. The question she asked then was one Spar, too, wanted to hear answered.

“Wait a minute. You woke up Kees?” Fil demanded. “What happened to that neat little story you just told me about how the Wardens were the ones in charge of waking up the Guardians and then tucking them back in for nap time?”

Ella hesitated. “We have a theory about that, but it’s just a working assumption at the moment. You see, it turns out that I kind of am a Warden.”

She must have noticed Fil’s baffled expression, because she rushed to clarify. “Only kind of, because I haven’t had any formal training of course. With the Guild scattered to the four winds, it’s not like I have a mentor guiding me through a series of lesson plans. I’m studying a few materials we’ve been able to dig up, and Kees is helping as much as he can, but we think that if the Guild had been operating normally I would have been recruited years ago and done the whole apprenticeship thing, the way it’s supposed to happen.”

The news took Spar by surprise, and—judging by her expression—that word barely scratched the surface of what Fil was feeling about it. He watched confusion, understanding, shock, and bafflement play across her features before she uttered a ragged half laugh.

“For that to have been the cause, I would have to be some kind of magic user, too, right?” Fil shook her head. “El, come on. I don’t even own a rabbit, let alone a top hat to pull one out of.”

“Magic, Fil, not illusion. Trust me, I’ve learned a lot over the past couple of weeks, and one of the most important lessons for me was that magic is just another word for ‘energy,’ and a magic user is nothing more than a person who can work with that energy on a level above the average human being.” Ella gave her a level look. “Are you honestly going to try to deny that you’re one of those people? To me? After you saw some of the things that happened with me?”

Spar saw the quick denial rise to Fil’s lips, and saw her just as quickly push it down. She looked less than happy to have such an admission pulled from her lips.

“Fine. I can’t deny that I can see things most people can’t,” Fil bit out, clutching her blanket tighter, “but I have never in my life ‘worked with’ it, or however you want to phrase it. Seeing auras and being able to identify people with special abilities is a hell of a lot different from casting spells and battling the forces of evil, El. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

On the screen, Ella’s face went hard for a moment, the expression ill suiting her appearance of soft sweetness. “Believe me when I tell you, Felicity Jane, that I know more about evil forces at the moment than I hope you will ever have to find out, but neither one of us gets to make that choice. If you’ve awoken a Guardian, you’re in this war now, and your place is as a Warden. Like it or not.”

“Um, not.”

Felicity. Was that the human’s actual name? It suited her far better than that masculine nickname he so disliked, Spar decided. At the moment, however, a name that translated as “happiness” sat poorly on her small shoulders. She looked as pleased with the news of her involvement in the battle against the Darkness as he felt. A longing to protect her surged within him, and he fought back the urge to snarl his displeasure.

He leaned down and peered into the phone, seeking out his brother’s gaze, hoping to convey his feelings without stating them so abruptly. “I like this idea no more than she does, Kees. Even if you are correct about Felicity being an unnamed Warden, the very fact that she has no training makes bringing her into a situation like this untenable. She cannot be expected to face nocturnis untrained. We must find what is left of the Guild and deliver her to them. They can protect her while you and I confront this danger.”

“‘Deliver’ me? Am I a bloody package now?”

Both warriors ignored her.

“Were you not listening, Spar? The Guild no longer exists, not as we knew it. Even if we could locate a member who would agree to train her, it would do us no good. The Wardens have all they can handle protecting themselves at the moment. We cannot place on them another burden.”

“And now I’m a burden. This just keeps getting better and better.”

Spar felt a tiny thud on the back of his shin, as if a moth had butted against him on its flight through the night air. Wait, had that been the small human? Had she kicked him? He could not tell by glancing at her face. She had worn the same belligerent expression for at least half an hour.

“Yet more reason to think she must be placed somewhere out of harm’s way.” He turned back to Kees, determined to impress upon him the importance of keeping Felicity safe. “She has already been injured once. It is too much to ask that she risk such danger a second time.”

Ella butted back into the center of the frame. “Fil, is that true? Were you hurt? You sounded fine, so I just assumed Spar got you out without a problem.”

Felicity shot Spar a glare, which he ignored. If she expected that he would not mention the nocturnis’s spell, she was mistaken. Kees and Ella needed to realize what sort of risk they courted by asking her to join this crusade.

“I’m not hurt,” she repeated, irritation filling her voice. “Like I told rocks-for-brains over here half a dozen times, I’m fine. The lunatic at the abbey tried to blast me with something, but I don’t think it took.” She held her hand up to the phone’s camera and showed them her palm, where only a patch of reddened skin indicated the spot where the magical blow had landed. “A little sunburn is all. Magicburn. Whatever. I’m fine.”

Kees peered at the screen and scowled. “The vermin cast a spell at you? And it touched you? What was it? What did he say?”

Fil raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips like she’d tasted something sour. “Um, yeah, sorry, but I was too busy trying to get the hell out of there to take notes on the ravings of a certifiable basket case. I’ll do better next time.”

“As you can see, it is too dangerous to involve her,” Spar cut in before the other warrior could respond to that sarcastic taunt. Now was not the time for squabbling. “I will leave Felicity and come to you, Kees. We will make a plan to deal with this threat together.”

The other Guardian jerked his head. “I understand your reaction, Spar, but you must pause and think. What if the minion the Hierophant sent survived the explosion? You know there are spells that can shield a human from such things. If the nocturnis lives, he will undoubtedly report back to his sect that a human woman witnessed the attack, as well as your awakening.”

“And,” Ella cut in, “if they even suspect that Fil has powers of her own, they’ll come after her, Spar. Believe me when I tell you, the Order isn’t kidding around about destroying the Guild. Whether Fil is a member or not, they’ll want her dead. They don’t want new recruits replacing the members they’ve already destroyed. They want to salt the proverbial earth the Guild stands on.”

Kees sighed. “I am afraid she is already at risk, my friend, whether we draw her deeper into our confidence or not.”

“Then I will send her to you. If she is not safe here, she must go elsewhere,” Spar insisted. “You will guard her while I determine if the nocturnis still lives. If he does, it will not be for long.”

“Spar, you are reacting without logic. You must stop and think. Vancouver is no safer for Felicity than Montreal. In fact, the Order has more reason to be wary of Ella and me, since we already destroyed several of their number here. It is only a matter of time before they come after us again. We must concentrate on more important matters. Our first priority is to locate the rest of our brethren. We must all be awoken and warned of the enemy’s plans.”

A shrill beeping sound punctuated the statement Spar had not wanted to hear. With a sigh, Felicity reached past him and tapped the phone’s screen.

“Um, not that I’m disagreeing about the world needing saving, and all,” she said, “but my phone is about to run out of battery. Could we maybe continue our kaffeeklatsch later? Like, near an outlet?”

Ella forced a smile that dragged with weariness. Spar could read it in the dark circles under her eyes and the drooping of her shoulders.

“Of course,” the other woman said. “We’ve thrown an entire encyclopedia of information at you—”

“Felt more like you dropped an Acme anvil on my head,” Felicity muttered.

“—and it’s already getting close to morning. You need to get some rest. And, you know, wash some of the gravel and stuff out of your hair.” Ella smiled and gestured to her face. “Maybe wipe off the smears of charcoal.”

“We can meet again tomorrow to discuss what must be done.” Kees’s nod was all masculine meaning and aimed squarely at Spar. “I will admit that while I would not have wished another human female to be dragged into this war, I will be glad to have you stand at my shoulder, brother. I fear it will require the strength of all our brethren to cast the Darkness back into the abyss this time.”

His gaze flickered to Felicity, and Spar nodded grimly. “Whatever must be done, we will do,” he vowed. “By my honor as a Guardian, I swear this. The Light will lead us to triumph.”

“Yeah, that’s just great,” his small human said beside him, her tone dry and acid. “But since you flew us here without so much as letting me pick up my bike first, and since I’m not entirely sure exactly where ‘here’ is anyway, Mr. Tall, Gray, and Invincible, the real question is: Is the Light going to lead me back to my apartment? Because I would kill for a shower right about now.”