Bound Guardian Angel (37 page)

He broke into hardy laughter, pushing open
the door to what was a surprisingly elegant office, gesturing for
her to take a seat in a burgundy leather chair as he rounded the
mahogany desk to what looked almost like a throne.

“Please, have a seat.”

She parked her ass in the rich leather as he
did the same behind the desk.

His dark eyes narrowed on her
appreciatively. “I have a feeling you and I are going to get along
splendidly,
Just Cordray
.” He flipped open a slender, silver
laptop.

She batted her lashes and forced a smile.
“Just keep your hands to yourself, Diggy, and it’ll be all good.”
After all, she didn’t want to have to kill her best lead into
Bishop’s master plan just because he felt like taking a liberty or
two.

“Diggy. Cute.” He tapped a few keys, and the
printer behind him stirred to life. “And there’s no need to worry
about my hands. I’m quite innocuous to the female membership, I can
assure you.”

“Why? Are you gay?”

His eyelids popped upward as his gaze dialed
in on hers. Then his lips twisted into a subtle smile. “A valid
question, given how I phrased my previous statement.”

“And will I get a valid answer?”

He made a contemplative noise in his throat
as he rotated his chair to snatch whatever he’d printed. Then he
spun back around to face her.

“Perhaps I will rephrase my statement. I’m
quite innocuous to
all
members,
Just Cordray
. I
simply emphasized the female members because I am, in fact,
unequivocally heterosexual.” He leaned forward, sliding the piece
of paper toward her. “I would prove it to you, but as I said, I
don’t pursue romantic entanglements with the members, even ones as
strikingly beautiful as you.” He bowed his head in dramatic
deference. Clearly, he was making fun of her, but only because he
knew she could take it.

“Ah, Diggy, you do say the sweetest things.”
She dismissed his flamboyantly insincere flirtation and perused the
sheet of paper he’d just slid in front of her. “What’s this?”

“Your contract.” He folded his hands on his
desk, back to all business. “It iterates what I’ve already told you
about our rules. Read it thoroughly then sign it.” He reached
inside the top drawer and retrieved a pen, then placed it in front
of her. Montblanc. Of course.

She reviewed all the points in detail then
scribbled her John Hancock on the dotted line. Then she filled in a
form with a few pertinent details, including her mobile number, as
Digon explained that they don’t use online files, which would be
too easy to hack. And since secrecy and anonymity was of the utmost
importance, he operated only out of hard files.

Smart, if not a bit antiquated.

“Now what?” She pushed the paper across the
desk.

He tucked it into a leather folio, which he
locked inside the top drawer.

He stood and gestured for her to join him.
“Now I show you to the floor,
Just Cordray
.”

She was in.

Chapter 18

Ronan pulled his Yamaha to the side of Montrose
Avenue behind Graceland Cemetery and shut off the engine. Once
more, he checked his rearview mirror for a tail and found none.
Looked like Micah and his buddies still hadn’t caught his scent.
Not that he expected they would or even could. He was too good at
covering his tracks with the talents he’d learned from his father,
which was about the only good thing he’d gotten from ol’ dad other
than the requisite sperm required to create him in the first
place.

He was a ghost. A wraith passing through,
nothing more. And he wanted to keep it that way.

But Cordray was getting close. She was
cunning. More cunning than Micah. If anyone could find him, it was
her, but tonight she was busy putzing around in Digon’s world.
Ronan had made sure of that so he could play with his new toy
without worrying she might show up. Be that as it may, he still
needed to pay her a visit to warn her away for good. She was
getting too close and seemed to be the only one in Micah’s circle
who had a brain.

He had been pleasantly surprised to see her
Grudge Match application hit his inbox this morning while they
bantered back and forth. He wasn’t sure if her interest in Grudge
Match had to do with him or the work she did for her brother, but
his inner thrill seeker hadn’t been able to resist approving her
for membership.

Oh sure, he’d had to doctor the background
check to remove certain facts before showing it to Digon, but the
potential payoff was worth it. He could use her preoccupation with
the fight club to his advantage and slip out to do his
extracurricular activities while Digon kept her entertained.
Besides, taking such risks gave him a mental hard-on.

A Skeletor boner, as Cordray had put it.
Yes, he’d been watching them as they floundered in that parking lot
by the river. And listening. After all, that was part of the
fun.

At any rate, it had been fortuitous that her
application had cycled to him. Any of the others Digon had assigned
to do background checks would have rejected it in a hot minute. All
because she worked for the king. If only they knew her real
relationship to King Bain. How would they feel if they knew they
now had royal blood fighting in the cage?

As pleased as he was to have slipped her
into the club, he’d stuck himself between a rock and a hard place
and, in hindsight, might have been smarter to reject her
application. With Cordray inside Grudge Match, she might eventually
discover his identity. He used a lot of tricks and gadgets to hide
his scent and keep his identity a secret, so it wasn’t likely she
would recognize him anytime soon, but he needed to be more careful,
and not just on fight nights. He needed to be more careful, in
general.

Today, for instance. He couldn’t slip up
like that again. He’d let his personal feelings get the better of
him while exchanging messages with her. If he wanted to remain
hidden, he needed to do a better job of staying inside his mind’s
neutral zone rather than diverting down the trail of personal
resentment.

Unfortunately, the word careful wasn’t part
of his standard vocabulary. For him, the greater the risk, the
greater the reward. He got off on taking chances, but with Cordray
getting so close, either he needed to temper his daredevil ways, at
least for a while, or he needed a contingency for when he got
caught. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That was his
motto. And if worse came to worst and the heat got too close, he
could always quit the fight club. But that would be a shame.

Grudge Match was the first and only place
where he felt like he actually fit in. It was his sanctuary. A
place where he could publicly show off his physical talents without
fear of condemnation for drawing attention to himself. In Grudge
Match, he was treated like someone of importance. In only four
months, Digon had made him one of his screeners, a job he shared
with five others, including Rule, Digon’s right-hand man who had
taken a particular interest in mentoring him.

Rule must have seen something in him that
his own father hadn’t. So much the better. He could use a stronger
father figure in his life.

As a screener, he was responsible for
approving or rejecting applicants. Digon issued invitations to run
the gauntlet based on
his
recommendations. No one had ever
entrusted him with such an important task, and it gave him a sense
of identity and purpose. He would hate to lose that, which meant he
needed to figure out a way to keep Cordray from discovering who he
was.

All the more reason to pay her a visit.

He dismounted the motorcycle and removed his
helmet, which allowed his long bangs to fall over his eyes.

Flicking his head to the side, he pushed his
hair off his forehead, looked up and down the street, then
crossed.

It was a quarter till midnight, and the gate
at the cemetery’s entrance was closed, so he had to jump the wall
and scale the fence. Fine by him. The mausoleum he was interested
in sat two-thirds of the way through the cemetery, anyway. He could
get to it faster by climbing the fence in back than he could by
going through the front.

After securing the grip gloves on his hands
and tugging the black ski mask with the skull face over his head,
he leaped over the wall then pulled himself up the black, wrought
iron fence with his special gloves and grip shoes then dropped to
the ground on the other side.

Silent darkness and hundreds of light-grey
tombstones stretched out in front of him.

Keeping off the roads that wound through the
cemetery, he used the mature trees and their young, springtime
foliage to stay hidden as he made his way toward the pyramid-shaped
mausoleum where the lycans were rumored to have secretly created a
gateway between dimensions.

He could have dematerialized and gotten
there faster without risking being seen, but what fun would that
be? Not only would that have been a safe move—a pussy move—but this
way, if he got caught breaking and entering he could piss off his
father. And other than stretching the limits of safety by risking
his life, nothing thrilled him more than pissing off the old man
and cementing his inferior status in Dad’s eyes.

The pyramid silhouette of the mausoleum
appeared about a hundred feet in front of him, and he slipped
silently but swiftly toward it.

Less than a minute later he was standing in
front of the light-green door with its snake handle. He had never
broken into a mausoleum before, but surely one of his lock picks
would do the trick.

Thirty seconds later, he was inside.

The space was compact. A stained-glass
window, which probably made quite an impression with sunlight
shining through it, took up the back wall. In the darkness, the
window looked like nothing more than textured glass.

The energy contained within the four granite
walls seemed vibrant and portentous, as if the structure had known
he was coming and now rejoiced at his arrival.

He unzipped his jacket pocket and pulled out
the ankh, which made the contained energy inside the tomb vibrate
even harder. He could actually feel it pulse against his skin.
Taking a Maglite Mini from his pocket, he began searching the
closed-in space until he found the thin rectangular slot he was
searching for along the back wall, near the corner.

That had to be it. He pulled his bottom lip
between his teeth and stared in awe at the innocuous space between
the frame of the stained-glass window and the granite surrounding
it. The dark void couldn’t have been more than a centimeter wide,
but it was more than enough for the ankh to fit into.

His thumb caressed the rounded loop at the
top of the ankh as hope rose within him. In theory, he knew how
opening the gates worked, but in practicality he had no idea. Maybe
some gates required certain keys, or maybe each gate had its own.
He didn’t know. Being that this gate had been created more
recently, when the mausoleum was built in the late 1800s,
attempting to open it with an ankh Micah had possessed for almost a
thousand years seemed foolhardy, but he had to try.

What if this ankh
did
open the gate?
The possibility was enough to spur him onward. Because if he could
open this gate, maybe he could escape this godforsaken existence
and go somewhere else. Somewhere he could make a difference. Where
he didn’t have to live in Micah Black’s shadow.

But what if the gate didn’t open? Then what?
He supposed he would just have to try again somewhere else.

Refusing to wait a moment longer, he slipped
the ankh inside the slot, held his breath, and waited.

Nothing.

He sent up a silent prayer. He wanted this
to work so damn badly.

The ruby in the ankh began to glow.

A low hum vibrated the air, coalescing the
coiling energy around him.

Holy shit, he’d done it! He’d opened a
ga—

Abruptly, the hum stopped. The ruby’s glow
faded.

Almost forty years ago, when he’d still been
just a kid, he’d awakened to a heavy, fresh snow. At least four
inches had fallen overnight. He remembered standing just inside the
garage of the home he’d shared with his father at the time, staring
out at the pale-grey dawn as millions of fat, airy snowflakes
floated lazily to the ground. The insulated silence had been
deafening. Like he’d been inside a soundproof room.

That’s how he felt now. Even the crickets
had stopped chirping.

His heart fell.

No gate had opened.

He was stuck here. There would be no magical
journey to another dimension. No chance for a better life. No
better future. No risk.

At least not tonight.

But there were other gates. He had the map.
He couldn’t decipher much of the writing on it, but he knew it was
a map of the portals. Even if he had to travel around the world, he
would find the gate this ankh worked in. And then he would be
gone.

With a renewed sense of purpose, he pulled
the ankh from the slot, tucked it in his pocket, and shut the
mausoleum’s door behind him as he slipped back into the shadows. A
few minutes later, he was back on his motorcycle, speeding off into
the night.

It was time to plan a visit with
Cordray.

* * *

Behind the mausoleum, the air shimmered as the portal
ripped a seam through the fabric of space and time, opening a
shadowy hole in midair. A flash of greenish-blue light lit the
trees and tombstones. A moment later, a large male, clothed in a
tattered shirt and pants, fell to the ground, landing on his side
with a painful thud.

Hunter groaned and blinked, then squeezed
his eyes shut and winced as his muscles protested the harsh
impact.

What in Osiris’s Netherworld had just
happened? One second he was sleeping, and the next, he was falling
then slamming into the ground.