Demon Forged (36 page)

Michael sighed.

Michael.
“Your name isn’t demon.”

“No. I was named after a friend of my father’s.”

She stared at him. “An angel?”

“Archangel. And one of the seraphim. Before the Second Battle, and while I was a boy, they were frequent visitors at my father and mother’s table.”

When his father had been something other than a demon. Something more, or something less? “What were they like?”

“Beautiful. Kind. I loved them.” He smiled slightly. “And I was terrified by them.”

Her mouth dropped open. She didn’t know which shocked her more—that Michael could
admit
to being terrified, or that something could terrify him.

But she believed him. Aside from that smile, which wasn’t exactly full of joy and amusement, his face didn’t give much away—yet his eyes had become obsidian.

“Why terror?”

“They make you want to serve them. They cannot help it, and they do not intend their effect—yet it is there. And it is why humans thought they were gods. With angels, the line between free will and compulsion is blurred.”

And that alone had frightened him? “Were they very powerful?”

“They could level mountains. They
could
heal your brother.”

The emphasis in his voice made her guess, “But they wouldn’t?”

“No. Because everything that is not done of free will, is
His
will. And so they would feel sympathy, offer comfort, but they would not change it.” He paused. “We would.”

The Guardians? “But you can’t.”

“No,” he said. “We can’t.”

“Why would you change it? Don’t you think it is His will—or, or . . . fate?”

“No. It is only chance. If fate determined anything, I would have no reason to be a Guardian. Nothing we did would matter. Free will wouldn’t matter so much—the Rules wouldn’t hinge on it—if everything is left to chance.”

“Even though the
angels
believe it’s His will—?”

“Lucifer was an angel once. He made a mistake. They might have, too.”

She had to laugh. “That’s one view of the Guardians that I haven’t heard before. Not better than angels—just a little more willing to admit their mistakes.”

“Yes.” He smiled again, and the intensity of his look deepened. “Would you become one of us?”

Would she? “Yes. But probably not for the right reasons,” she admitted. “I’m too much of a coward to die.”

His obsidian eyes seemed to absorb the light. “So am I.”

Even with the door standing open to the frigid tundra, the forge was too hot. Irena had fed the furnaces too much before she’d left, and returned to stifling air that wrapped her in a suffocating cocoon. Each crackle from the hearth fire exploded in her ears. She couldn’t push the heat out.

But she could shut her eyes against the firelight. A tall iron block stood before her, and she ran her hands down the smooth sides. She made her mind as shapeless, emptying it of images and concentrating only on her emotions.

She focused. Her Gift gathered her emotions and shoved them into the iron, sculpting the metal without her direction.

Irena stepped back and looked. This one was uglier than usual, pitted and misshapen. Spikes grew out of irregular lumps, as if a warty boar had belched cactus spines. Twisting iron ropes with razor edges surrounded dark hollows. She circled around to the back, found a semi-transparent tendril curling over a spike. She flicked her fingernail against it, listened to the clear chime.

Smiling, she continued her circle. She never knew what to expect, or what to make of these sculptures. She’d discovered her Gift this way, in an outpouring of strong emotion. Practice had lent her control, until she could form an eyelash from steel. Within three hundred years of her transformation, she’d been able to manipulate metal into lifelike movement, a skill she’d taken great pleasure in.

Yet these mindless sculptures pleased her almost as much. Seeing them always lightened her mood. She’d long thought that her method of creating them was not much different than drifting. Guardians didn’t sleep, and most cleared their minds of emotional and psychic buildup by meditating; Irena cleared hers in one push of her Gift.

Despite the similarity of method, however, the sculptures unsettled most other Guardians. Several times, she’d put a selection in the courtyard near her quarters in Caelum so that she could see them as she came and went, and she couldn’t help but notice the unease with which Guardians—young and old—had skirted around them. She’d heard their theories about her emotions and state of mind—almost all which had pushed her into laughter. The sculptures she made in her best moods were just as ugly as when she was angry.

Alejandro was one of the few who knew that. It had only been a week before their encounter with the demon, she remembered. They’d spent hours arguing over an essay about nature and beauty that he’d found in Caelum’s library and read aloud to her here. Olek had been in agreement with the author; Irena had not. It was that simple, but afterward, Olek had stalked from one end of the forge to the other, reading the essay again—probably looking for a point he could use to sway her. Irena had not minded; the sight of Olek, stalking and determined, had been worth watching.

Until she’d realized that the hungers she’d buried were being uncovered with his every step. Then she’d formed her iron block, blanked her mind, and shoved her emotions into it.

She’d felt Olek’s astonishment when he’d turned to see what she’d created. He’d examined it from every angle, then looked at her.

With a hint of laughter around his eyes, he’d said, “This is not anger.”

No. Her Gift stripped her emotional shields, and he’d felt everything she’d put into the block of iron: her contentment, her desire, the deep pleasure of being here with him.

Of course, he’d thought she’d been making an argument of her own.

“I see your point,” he’d said. “When there is no will to shape an object, then the only meaning it has is what the person seeing the sculpture gives to it.”

She’d been about to remark that his conclusions also said more about him than about her sculpture, but then he’d added, “And when your will shapes the metal, the result is nothing but what you intend it to be. All of those statues of me—they are just that: me. No one could mistake them for anything else, or read any more meaning into them.”

She could not answer then—she had been laughing too hard. If anyone with eyes looked at the statues she’d made of him, they would know instantly how beautiful she’d thought him. How every plane and angle of his body had become a new landscape to explore beneath her hands. How she had fought to understand why the tightening of his fingers had so many meanings, in what combination his brows and eyes and lips would tell her what he thought. It was all there, in each sculpture she’d made.

Olek hadn’t seen it, but he’d never seen himself as she did. She’d laughed as he declared that she’d misunderstood his arguments. And he’d finally tossed away the essay, and invited her to spar with him, instead.

That had been a memorable day—one of many memorable days with him, in a life that had grown very long and the years indistinguishable.

Irena sighed and returned to the front of her latest sculpture, running her fingers over one of the ridged bumps. She missed those days almost as much as she treasured them.

And it had been so long since they had fought so well together. She wanted to recapture it . . . but once again, she had no idea how to move forward. If he would take a demon’s role, she didn’t see how it could be done.

Icy air touched the back of her neck. The forge had finally cooled. She walked to the open door and stopped, shielding her eyes and looking out over the windswept snow.

In the brilliant midday sun, the plain shimmered a blinding white. Half a kilometer distant, three figures trudged through the snow toward her forge. Two men, one woman—each dressed in a bright, bulky coat, synthetic pants, and heavy boots that told her they’d come from a city.

A psychic probe confirmed they were human. Irena searched the horizon behind them, but didn’t see any vehicles. They’d been traveling for a while, then.

One of the men lifted his arm. Irena waved, then headed back inside.

Unease prickled at the back of her neck. She paused, glanced over her shoulder. Another psychic probe confirmed the first: They were human.

It wasn’t the first time travelers had stopped here, whether lost or simply heading through. Reindeer farmers moved their herds across these plains during the summer, sometimes camping within a stone’s throw of her forge. There had been tourists, surveyors. She’d never turned anyone back.

She would, however, be careful.

With a mental pull, she called in her pantry from her cache. The fifty-year-old bread would still be fresh, and there were enough canned goods to feed the three humans for a week, if necessary. She set the rustic table near the central hearth, called in an aluminum hip bath and a stuffed tick mattress piled high with furs.

When she was done, her forge looked like the home of an eccentric sculptor who lived very simply. She’d learned years ago that calling herself an artist provided unspoken answers to many questions about her lifestyle.

She returned to the door and looked out. They were making good time. Her unease began to crawl down her spine.

Inhospitable or not, she didn’t want these people in her home.

Without giving herself a chance to reconsider, Irena formed her rabbit-fur mantle over her shoulders, and walked out to meet them. If she had to, she would carry them back to civilization.

An icy crust lay over the snow. Her feet broke through with every step, sinking two or three inches to the compact snow beneath. Now and then, she sank farther—up to her knee, or thigh.

They were doing the same, she saw. Stupid of them, and a sign of their inexperience in this terrain. If they’d walked in single file, the one in the lead could break the trail, and the others could follow in his steps. They’d be exhausted by the time they reached her. As far as they’d come, they probably already were exhausted.

But they should have been breathing harder than they were.

Irena watched their mouths, the frozen puffs of air. Each was as even as hers. Impossible.

Dread dragged over her skin like icy fingernails. Her psychic probe
had
encountered an unshielded human mind. A demon couldn’t mask that. Which meant they had to be nephilim.

Three
nephilim.

Terror bulged in her chest, rose thick and acrid in her throat. She swallowed it down. She strengthened her psychic shields, refusing to let her fear leak through. The nephilim hadn’t tried to reach out to her mind yet—doing so would reveal the demon inside theirs. So they were hiding. Probably waiting until she came closer.

In their human forms, nephilim were weaker than vampires—but they could shape-shift almost instantly.

Fifty meters separated them now.

Her heart pounded. Irena hoped they couldn’t hear it yet. She pinned on a smile and prayed they’d be fooled by the welcome. Prayed they’d let her come closer. Prayed she’d have time to slay just one before they shifted to their demonic forms.

According to Drifter—one of two Guardians who’d fought the nephilim—in their demonic form they were many times stronger and faster than he was, a century-old Guardian. Irena was much faster than Drifter, too. But was she fast enough to survive against three nephilim?

Despair cried out beneath the fear. She silenced it and forced herself to think. Tried to grab onto something amidst the slippery slope of hopelessness.

Olek had once slain a nephil by using explosives. Irena didn’t have any. But she had her Gift. She knew how to fight on this snow-packed plain. In her cache, she carried the vampire blood that weakened and slowed them.

Hot determination suddenly burned away every other emotion.

Ten meters. The male in the center had pretty blue eyes and thick brown eyelashes. His frosted breath covered his upper lip. He smiled and called out a greeting in Russian.

They
all
smiled, the boar-fucking bastards.

Irena grinned back at them.
Look well, hellspawn. I might die, but these teeth will be in your throat.

The male on the left took a step and broke through the ice-crusted snow to his hip. It was an advantage Irena hadn’t expected. She didn’t waste it.

Irena leapt, shooting toward him with her knees close to her chest, making herself as small a target as possible. Before she’d covered half the distance, he shape-shifted. His clothes vanished. His frame lengthened, muscles bulging beneath pale skin that deepened to crimson as it stretched. The whites of his eyes hardened to obsidian stones. Huge black feathered wings whipped open, flinging snow. A sword glinted in his right hand, and he swung the blade into the path of Irena’s leap.