Baen touched down on the rooftop indicated by his Warden and set her gently beside him. She had ceased to tremble with nerves some minutes ago and had even sounded delighted with her view of the city when she finally opened her eyes to identify their destination.
Before that, she had remained silent during their brief trip, which had given him his first chance to wonder at their situation. Something felt very off. It had little to do with Ivy or Martin themselves, but rather the circumstances bringing all three of them together. He could tell that Martin was indeed a Warden, as he possessed a definite signature of magical ability, faint though it was, and he bore every indication of being trained by the Guild; but Baen did not understand why Ivy insisted that she was not a Warden as well.
Her power easily eclipsed Martin’s, and she had been the one in charge when he found them in the alley. That had been obvious. While Martin had retreated to the back of the alley in the face of the demonic attack and contributed to the fight by losing hold of his last meal, Ivy had fought their attackers head-on, with every ounce of strength and determination she possessed. Only one of those reactions suited the position of Warden in Baen’s mind. The other spoke too loudly of cowardice and ill preparation for a dangerous situation.
Of everything, the danger was the part of the picture of which Baen felt most certain. He had woken into a cloud of Darkness. He could feel it polluting the atmosphere of the human world, and he knew the threat posed by the Order was stronger than he had ever before experienced. He only wished he had woken sooner. As it was, he would need to get himself up to speed as quickly as possible, and he would need the help of both these Wardens to manage that.
“Is he still passed out?” Ivy asked, her voice tipping him out of his own thoughts.
“Again more than ‘still,’” Baen answered, glancing down at Martin’s limp form. He stirred once, then immediately passed out again. “I do not think he enjoys heights.”
“Gee, I wonder why. Could it have something to do with the fear of falling from them and landing on a nice, hard patch of concrete? Why would something like that bother a person?”
“I may not be human, but I recognize the normal human responses to stress. You use sarcasm in order to express your feelings of irritation. Does this make you feel better?” he asked, curious.
She just glared at him. “Come on. Let’s get inside. Can you manage Martin?”
In answer, Baen merely shifted the Warden to a one-armed grip and gestured for Ivy to lead the way. She shook her head.
“We need to go down the fire escape on the outside of the building, and it’s still early enough that in this neighborhood, there’s a decent chance of being seen,” she informed him. “I don’t suppose you can do anything to, uh, stand out a little less, is there? I mean, you can’t, like, fold the wings up any smaller, can you?”
“Ah, you wish to be cautious and to ‘blend in’ to the area?” He thought she might have rolled her eyes before nodding in reply, but the gesture was quick. He thought it best not to waste time in an argument—not when he planned to spend much of the remaining night requiring her to answer his questions—so he ignored it.
He set Martin down at his feet, then stepped back to give himself a little room. With a quick thought and a mental rearrangement of his inherent magic, Baen reshaped himself into a small, human-seeming version of himself. His features retained their same basic shape, but smoothed out the most drastic lines and angles. His horns shrank down and disappeared, his wings melted away into his muscles, his claws retracted into human fingernails, and his skin thinned and turned a shade of light tan that looked drastically different from its natural gray tone. He shrank several inches, both in height and in breadth, now standing only a few inches over six feet with a proportional reduction in his musculature.
He even used the information in his communal knowledge bank to generate for himself a suitably human set of clothing, consisting of worn denim jeans, a dark-colored shirt, and a pair of sturdy boots. After a quick look at his human companions, he added a jacket over the top in concession to the air he guessed their species might consider chilly.
“Is this better?” he asked Ivy.
For a moment, she simply stared at him, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted. She looked almost stupefied.
“Warden?” he prompted after a moment. Then, when she didn’t respond, “Ivy?”
She jumped. “Huh? What? Oh. Oh, uh, yeah,” she mumbled, turning away and shoving her hands into her pockets. “Yeah, that’s fine. Thanks. The, uh, the stairs are this way.”
Ivy crossed to the rear corner of the roof where a set of curved safety rails stood up over the top of the wall. Using both arms this time, Baen lifted Martin and followed, carefully descending the ladder to a small landing where the system changed to a set of steep iron stairs. At the bottom, the female drew a heavy set of keys from her pocket and unlocked a door painted a bright but chipping shade of blue.
“In here,” she said, stepping over the threshold into an unlit kitchen. Baen crossed behind her and deposited his unconscious passenger in a straight-backed chair, even as the flick of a switch illuminated the room around them. Martin shifted and moaned, but neither of them paid him any attention.
“Do you live here?” Baen asked, looking around the cramped space. He couldn’t picture her easily in these surroundings. The cabinets had been painted white, but looked more gray than anything else. Dingy. The cheap material of the countertop had chipped along the edges, and while the place looked tidy—no dirty dishes or used pots and pans piled up—dust covered most of the surfaces and an air of unkempt neglect hung over it.
It came from more than the dust and the smudged windows, too. He noticed no personal touches in the space, no plants on the windowsill, no pictures on the walls. Not even a whimsical canister to enliven the stark anonymity of the place. It didn’t suit the citrus-scented Warden called Ivy in the least.
“No. Wouldn’t want to be tracked there,” she said, turning to grab a dented teakettle off the stove. She rinsed it inside and out before filling it with clean water and setting it back on the burner she quickly lit. “Or take the chance of someone waiting for us there, either. This place belonged to another Warden. I figured it was probably safe because he’s already dead. No reason for the Order to come back and kill him again.”
“Dead? And you believe the nocturnis bear the responsibility.” The news did not shock Baen, but it did renew his determination to get a firm handle on the current situation. Certainly the Guild of Wardens and the Order of Eternal Darkness had been at odds for millennia, but rarely did they manage to slaughter each other without bringing about swift and decisive conflicts that restored the balance between them.
Ivy shot him a sour look before she began opening and closing cupboards. Her intent became clear when she paused and pulled down several heavy mugs and a squat brown teapot. “Of course they do. For this guy, and for all the others.”
Baen felt a growl rise in his chest. Reflex and instinct. Guardians existed to protect humanity, after all, and for all their magical talents, Wardens were still human beings. “What others?”
The female opened her mouth, and judging by her expression, her intended response would have been sharp, but she caught herself before she uttered it. Her lips pressed together, and she took time for a deep breath.
“Sorry,” she said. “You have just woken, and I shouldn’t expect you to know everything that’s going on. It’s just, now that you are awake, and we finally have a Guardian on our side again, it’s really hard not to expect you to just snap your fingers—or maybe flap your wings—and put everything back to normal again. But I suppose it’s too late for just one of you to be able to do that now. So, I’m sorry.”
Baen dismissed her apology. It was unimportant, and he had been unoffended. “Explain to me what you mean. What is not normal? And what do you mean that you ‘finally have a Guardian on your side again’? My kind do not turn from humanity, let alone from the Wardens.”
“She means we’ve been up shit creek while you lot have been catching up on your beauty sleep.”
Martin’s voice made them both turn and note with surprise that the cowardly Warden had finally regained his senses and now sat slightly less slumped in his chair. He looked no happier than he did in the alley where the demon attack had occurred, but at least he could move under his own power again. That was helpful.
“The Order has wiped the Guild off the bloody map,” Martin continued bitterly. “The Light knows how many of us are left, but it’s sure as hell not enough for us to stop whatever those bastards have planned. And I think we can all hazard a guess as to what they’ve got planned.”
The Order only ever had one plan—to free the Seven from their prisons and allow them to unite to devour the human world with their evil. It was all very straightforward, really. Demonic and thoroughly malevolent, but straightforward. It was why the Guardians existed.
One problem at a time, though. What had the cowardly Warden meant about the Guild being wiped out?
When he asked, Ivy answered.
“He’s right. We don’t really know how many Wardens are left,” she said, “but we do know that a great, great many of them are dead and most of the rest are still missing. That’s why I was trying to get Martin to France. We’re trying to send all the survivors we can find to somewhere near Paris. We have a kind of Underground Railroad set up to move them there undetected. I take care of the ones who come through London and get them across the Channel, and my contact there picks them up for the last leg of the trip, delivering them to another contact who operates out of the city. The Guild hall itself is gone, of course, but they’ve set up a kind of safe house that they’re turning into a new temporary headquarters. Only the people there know exactly what’s going on. We try to limit contact between stages of the trip so that if one operative is discovered he or she can’t tell the Order too much about anyone else.”
Her mouth quirked in a wry grin. “It’s kind of like living in a spy movie, actually. I have a code name and everything. My contact in Coquelles knows me as Holly. Totally surreal.”
“No wonder your accent is gone,” Martin said, eyeing her suspiciously. “You had it down really well, but now you sound American.”
“I am,” she said. “Half anyway. My mum is English, and I was actually born in Oxford, but my dad is American and I grew up there.”
“So why aren’t you operating in America? Why come to London?”
Ivy turned away then and opened another cabinet to pull out a brightly colored paper box. From it, she pulled out a few tea bags and dropped them into the pot. “Long story. Now’s not the time.”
“Right,” Martin agreed. “Now’s the time to figure out how the bloody hell those demons found me and how I’m supposed to get to France if they’re still looking for me.”
Baen aimed a glare at the male, feeling a faint stirring of regret that his features in this form didn’t hold the same powers of intimidation that they did in his natural state. He’d like to scare some sense into the selfish coward. “No, now is the time for us to get a firm grasp on the situation and to decide on our next move.”
“Which should be getting me to France,” the Warden insisted. “You heard her. The Order is trying to kill me—to kill everyone in the Guild. If they do manage to wipe all of us out, humanity is doomed. Who’s going to save them if there’s no one left to summon the Guardians, eh?”
Baen stepped forward and curled his lip, wishing there were a fang there for him to flash. “I do not recall you summoning anyone, human, so perhaps one more lost Warden will not make such a very big impact.”
“Hey, settle down.” Ivy moved to stand between the Warden and Baen looming over him. “The last thing we need here is arguing among ourselves. Everybody take a deep breath and get a grip.”
The kettle chose just that moment to whistle, the sound making Martin jump visibly. Baen felt a surge of dark satisfaction.
“Guardian, you should sit,” she instructed. “There.” She pointed to the chair at the small dinette that held the position farthest from Martin. The distance would not slow down an angry Guardian, but it might offer the human a false sense of security. “I think we could all use some tea.”
“I could use more information.” Reluctantly, Baen took the seat the female indicated, settling his large frame onto the spindly wooden frame with caution. “To begin with, what has happened to the Guild of Wardens?”
“How much time have you got?” Martin scoffed.
Ivy sent him a narrow look. “I doubt there’s any milk in the fridge, Martin, but why don’t you look for some sugar?”
If Baen read the subtext properly—never a Guardian’s strong suit, mind you; his kind tended to find human behavior baffling—he detected a definite note of “and if you tell me you take it black I’ll pour it down your trousers” in the request. Perhaps the human male did, too, because he rose to examine the counters and cupboards.
“I told you I’m not a member of the Guild,” Ivy said, “so I wasn’t aware of any problem at all until about eight months ago. That’s when my uncle and cousin were killed.”
He watched her fiddle with the teapot, lifting the lid to check the color of the brew before pouring three mugs of the hot liquid. Baen had no desire to drink tea, but even less to interrupt the female’s story, so he said nothing.
“They were both members of the Guild,” she continued. “Uncle George was my mother’s older brother, and Jamie—James—was his son. His only child. Mum’s family have been in the Guild for generations. The Fitzroys. I grew up knowing about the existence of magic and the basics behind the Guild and the Order. I heard all the stories and everything, but we moved back to the States when I was only three, and since neither of my parents was a Warden I was well out of it for most of my life. I mean, we visited Uncle George every year, but demon hunting really never featured as a topic during family reunions.”
Baen should hope not. The Guild and the Guardians existed so that the rest of humanity did not have to concern themselves with the activities of the Order or the Demons they served. That should apply especially to human children, as Ivy had been.
“I knew Uncle George was a Warden, though, and I knew Jamie trained as one, too. We all sent him congratulations and gifts when he was inducted into the Guild, but that’s as much thought as I really gave it. I guess like most people, I took for granted that we weren’t in any real danger from the Darkness, because if we were, then the Wardens and the Guardians were there to deal with the threat.”
“That is how it’s supposed to work.” Martin set a small bowl on the table and immediately transferred three spoonfuls of white crystals from it into his teacup. “Most Wardens don’t expect to get involved in anything too messy. That’s why each Guardian has a personal Warden and why some Wardens specialize in battle magic and such things. Me, I was always much more the academic sort. I did research, spell testing, that kind of thing.”
Of that, Baen had no doubt. He could never imagine the timid male willingly facing off against a threat, even one as minor as a single nocturni. Put him up against a demon, and Martin would run screaming.
Or puking, as he had demonstrated in the alley earlier.
“Yes, well, it only works like that when the Guild has enough members,” Ivy said, shaking her head when the other human nudged the sugar bowl her way. “I didn’t know it until Uncle George was already gone, but several years ago, the Order began to … to pick off Wardens. I guess that’s the only way to describe it. They started with the most isolated ones, the ones least likely to be missed, and just made them disappear. They killed them.”
She paused to sip her tea before continuing. “No one registered it was a pattern until they started disappearing faster than the Guild could induct and train replacements. And still, it stayed quiet except in the immediate community of Wardens. It’s not the sort of thing they’d want to advertise, you know? Plus, outside of the Guild, who even knows they exist? Besides the nocturnis, of course. But not talking about it only made it easier for the Order to get to them, because they weren’t really expecting trouble. Then they hit the Guild headquarters directly. Not only did they take out almost a hundred Wardens in one shot, they destroyed the archives as well. It threw everything into chaos. The head council was wiped out; the rosters were gone. Honestly, had it never occurred to anyone that an electronic backup might be an idea worth considering? But anyway, no one even had access to records to tell them which Wardens were left or where to find them. At that point, the ones who were still alive went into hiding for their own protection.”
Baen tried to imagine the situation. It would have been chaos, indeed. The Guild had always clung to the traditions laid down during its long history, distrusting technology because they claimed it interfered with their magical abilities. He didn’t know if that was true or not. Guardians were magical beings, made of magic, but they could not utilize it in the way the Wardens did. A Guardian could never cast a spell. It might appear to be magic when he altered his form to appear human, but that was simply an alternate state of being as natural to him as his winged form. It had no effect on technology, and technology could not affect it.
Ivy grimaced, pulling his attention back to her story. “Maybe if Uncle George and Jamie had hidden, they’d still be alive, but they had realized what was happening. The Order had gone after the Guild to weaken it, but especially to prevent them from summoning the Guardians. We think the nocturnis have been trying to locate you guys as urgently as we have, only they want to get to you so that they can destroy you while you’re vulnerable.”
It was a sensible plan, though entirely lacking in honor. A Guardian possessed very few physical vulnerabilities. They were almost entirely immune to magic, supernaturally strong, and fiercely effective in battle. In their natural forms, their skin acted as armor superior to anything mankind had ever invented, and even when disguised as human, they remained stronger, faster, and harder to injure than any mortal. They also healed from wounds with amazing speed. An active Guardian was nearly impossible to kill.
However, when in their sleeping state, in the grip of magical slumber, a Guardian was very much like the stone statue he resembled. He weathered like stone in the elements—though that damage would disappear upon waking—and he could be smashed like stone with sufficient force. Being dropped from a great height, for example, would destroy a Guardian, as would explosives, or anything else that could generate massive concussive force.
Baen frowned. “I am confused by this. Yes, the nocturnis could attempt to destroy me and my brothers while we slept, but when one Guardian falls, another is immediately summoned. What good would it do the servants of the Darkness to break our sleeping forms when we would simply be replaced by another of equal ferocity?”
“The Guild has already discovered that’s not quite the way it works,” Ivy said, her expression grim. “An active Guardian who falls is immediately replaced, but if one of you is destroyed while you’re asleep, you don’t get a replacement until you’re called for. Until he’s called for. Whatever. A Guardian doesn’t just appear. A summoning still has to take place. So if the Order could thin out the Guild, destroy the Guardians while they’re in their statue forms, and not have enough Wardens left to perform summonings—”
“They could potentially strike before we could rise to stop them,” Baen finished, his voice degenerating into a snarl as the intention behind the nocturnis’ scheme became clear. “They could perhaps even manage to free one of the Seven from its prison without anything to stand in their way.”
“One?” Martin scoffed. The sound held a note of hysteria. “We’d be lucky if it were just one.”
“What do you mean?”
He’d risen halfway out of his chair before Ivy’s outstretched hand brushed against his arm and stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t know why.
“He means that we think that’s already happened,” she told him, a soft push urging him back into his seat. He fixed his gaze on her, and found her misty-gray eyes already watching him, their expression troubled but determined. “In fact, we think it’s happened more than once.”
The news made sparks of rage light in Baen’s chest. The urge to fly at something, to fight, to destroy, filled his veins with heat and burned behind his eyes. How had this been allowed to happen? Where were his brothers while this scourge of Darkness invaded the human world? Surely, in the face of such a serious threat, they could have woken without their Wardens’ ritual summonings.
“My contact in France says the group in Paris think there may be three of the Seven already here. And the Order won’t stop until they have freed them all.”