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 ludicrous 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 twin 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.”
It was the politest version of “go to hell” Ivy had ever had directed her way.
No, that wasn’t fair, she told herself and forced her hands to unclench from the fists she hadn’t realized she had made. Nothing in his tone or his posture indicated he felt any hostility over her reaction. Her overreaction. He had merely offered an explanation to counter her anger. Her fairly inappropriate anger.
Okay, Ivy. Time to step back and take a deep breath here. Then get a grip. The middle of a sticky situation is not the time to get distracted by emotion and bogged down in things that don’t matter. It’s the time to figure a way out of it. So, get busy.
Her inner voice was right. Closing her eyes, she took stock of her racing heartbeat, her trembling fingers, and the knot that had formed in the pit of her stomach—all signs of an adrenaline overdose. She had let the stress-induced hormone take over her thinking, and she knew from experience that reactions like that didn’t do anyone any good. She needed to get rational quick and switch to plan B.
One more deep breath, and she opened her eyes to meet the Guardian’s—Baen, he had said his name was—curious gaze.
“You’re right. Sorry,” she said, resettling her shoulders and subtly shaking some of the tension from her arms. “Getting out of there was the most important thing. Now we just need to regroup and figure out where to go from here.”
His expression hardened, suddenly looking a lot more like real carved granite. “My mind is still sorting through the return of my memories, but already I know that the Darkness is stirring and that this threat is larger than any my kind has faced in many centuries. We must contact the Guild and warn them, and then we must locate my brothers and root out whatever plan the Order has put into action this time.”
Man, if he only knew the half of it …
“Yeah, about that,” Ivy began.
Beside them, Martin stirred and gave a low moan.
Damn it. First things first.
“Warden?” Baen prompted, ignoring the waking man.
“My name is Ivy,” she told him. “You might as well use it. As for everything else, I’ll fill you in with as much as I know, but first we need to get someplace more secure than some random London rooftop. Those demons before pretty much came out of nowhere. I’d been watching, and until they appeared, the coast was looking clear, which means more could do the same thing and pop up any minute.”
“Do you have a suggestion?”
Ivy started to shake her head, and then hesitated. She already knew that getting to France tonight was out of the question, but taking Martin and the Guardian back to her uncle’s house in Little Naughton didn’t feel like an option. First off, in the little village, their presence would stand out like a plague sore, and secondly, everyone there knew who she was. She really had thought tonight’s mission was operating completely under the radar of the Order, but after the demon attack, she could no longer be so sure. Maybe she’d been identified, and if so, that also ruled out where she’d been staying in London—her cousin Jamie’s flat in Marylebone.
Another option occurred to her, though, one that might be safe for the simple reason that the worst had already happened there.
“Yeah, I do,” she finally said with a nod. “There’s a flat in Camden. I think we’d be fairly safe there. You know, all things considered. I’d say we can take the tube, but…” She ran her gaze over his hulking, horned, winged, clawed, generally inhuman form. “Ah … I’m not sure you wouldn’t cause a riot.”
Baen followed her glance. “You refer to my appearance standing out among the humans in a public place.”
“Maybe a little.” She held up her thumb and finger half an inch apart.
“This may be true, but I believe your kind would be equally curious about the reason why even a fellow human would be transporting an unconscious man on your transport system.”
Ivy glanced at Martin, who had slipped back into oblivion. Maybe Baen had a point.
“Besides, I can take us to our destination much faster and with little chance of being seen. You will simply guide me where I need to go.”
Her expression turned sour. “You mean you want to fly us over half of London like a low-budget airline. The kind that doesn’t even have seats on the planes. Or, you know, planes.”
“You doubt your safety with me?”
The Guardian looked so insulted that Ivy had to bite back a laugh. Apparently, the legends about his kind’s sense of honor had not been exaggerated. If anything, it sounded like Uncle George’s stories might have underplayed the situation.
“No. Of course not. But humans don’t just—” She broke off when she saw his expression turn stonier and stonier. He was really good at that. Quelle shocker. “You know what? Fine. We’ll play Stork-and-Baby-Delivery. Just don’t head for the stratosphere, okay? Try and keep the fall survivable for me.”
“I would not drop you.” He snarled. “And to avoid being seen, we must stay above the city lights. Or are you no longer concerned with UFO sightings?”
“Fine. I’ll keep my eyes closed.” She gritted the words out from between clenched teeth, wondering if it was better to punch the Guardian now so that he didn’t drop her from surprise when she decked him mid-flight. It wasn’t like she could hurt him, not with her best moves. She could pack every ounce of power she had into a kick right to his face and it would probably feel to him like a fly had landed on his nose.
Stony bastard.
Baen nodded and turned away as if that settled everything, so he didn’t see the glare she aimed at him. He simply scooped Martin up into one brawny arm and then turned back to her with an air of expectancy.
Ivy stepped close and let him lift her as well. Unlike Martin, though, she made sure to wrap her arms around Baen’s neck in a good grip of her own. She had no intention of falling, no matter how secure he thought his grasp was.
She also had no intention of noticing the way his hard muscles and ripped body felt pressed so close against her own.
Bloody hormones.
“Just be careful, big guy,” she told him, resisting the urge to wrap her legs around his hips for good measure. You know, to get a better hold. Against falling. Really.
“Do not worry, human. It has been centuries since I killed an innocent human. Technically.”
Ivy bit back a scream as the Guardian launched himself into the sky with the speed of a bullet.
Jerk.