Holy Smokes (35 page)

Instantly Pál and István were at his side. “Take Aisling’s family and the mortals out the side entrance,” he told Pál. “István, check the street. Kostya—”

“I’ll have a look around the chapel,” he said, suiting action to word.

The sudden breakup of the dragons had Gabriel hurrying up. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Drake filled him in while I turned to the guests and, with an apologetic smile, said in a loud voice, “I seem to have the worst luck with weddings. I’m very sorry to have to do this, but there seems to be a problem with the chapel, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to evacuate it. Quickly. We’ll regroup outside until we know the problem is fixed.”

“Aisling, this is the limit, this is the very limit,” Paula said, jerking away from where Pál was trying to move her. “You will go back in front of that minister and you will let him marry you, or so help me, I’ll…I’ll…well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but it won’t be pleasant!”

I hated to do it, I really did, but I didn’t have time to reason with her. I swung open the door in my mind and gave her a huge mental push. “Paula, you need to leave the building now. It’s nothing but a gas leak, but it’s dangerous to stay here. You must help the others get out quickly and stay out until we say it’s safe to return.”

“Oh, my!” she gasped, looking somewhat stunned. “A gas leak is dangerous! People! Quickly! We must leave immediately!”

She hurried off to herd people out the door.

“I’m going to end up frying her brain one day if I keep doing that,” I said under my breath.

Jim heard me. “Think anyone would notice?”

I ignored it as Rene caught my eye. “Can I do anything?”

“No. Just get your wife out and make sure no one comes back in.”

He nodded and gave my hand a little squeeze before dashing off to grab his wife and follow the last few people leaving.

“Aisling? What is it?”

Nora’s voice was quiet but calming. I turned around to find her, but with my enhanced vision turned on, I wasn’t so much seeing people as seeing their elemental parts. “I’m not sure. Do you feel something?”

She was silent a moment, then nodded. “It’s very faint, but yes, there is something here that is imbued with evil.”

“Jim?” The demon’s warm head pushed under my hand. “Where is it, Jim?”

“Can’t tell. I wasn’t sure there was anything until you started wigging out.”

I walked blindly down the center aisle of the chapel, searching in the corners and niches for signs of something that wasn’t right.

“Here!” Gabriel emerged from one of the back rooms and shouted out his findings. “I think it’s a bomb!”

“Get her out of the building,” Drake told his brother, who started toward me at a run, but I knew in a flash that he wasn’t going to make it in time.

Everything seemed to slow down, like time itself had telescoped as I flung myself sideways onto Nora, knocking her down onto a wooden pew. An explosion tore through the building with a vengeance, the scream of metal an almost human sound, followed by a concussive blast as the windows shattered. Shards of glass and wood and bits of stone rained down upon us, but to my relief, when I looked up the bulk of the building was still intact, with only the far end having been blown to smithereens.

Drake shouting my name relieved my paramount worry.

“We’re here,” I yelled, coughing at the dust that resulted from the wall of the nave being destroyed. “Nora, are you all right?”

“I think so. Yes. Dear god, who would bomb a church?”

“Are you hurt?” Drake yelled, pulling a large piece of the baptismal font off of someone.

“No, we’re OK.”

“Stay back there,” he ordered.

I pulled bits of wood and rock off Nora, helping her to sit up. Her hair was white with dust, her glasses broken and hanging askew.

“I have a pretty good idea that we have some dragons to thank for that. Jim?”

“Right here.”

“You OK?”

“No. I don’t seem to be able to feel my back legs. And it’s…it’s kinda hard to breathe.”

I crawled out of the shelter of the pews to find Jim lying in the aisle, one of the wooden benches that lined the nave broken on top of it.

“Oh, no,” I cried, half crawling over to where it lay. “Don’t move. We’ll get a vet. Oh, dear god, there’s so much blood! Drake! Jim’s hurt!”

With an effort, Jim lifted its head and turned its eyes toward me, fear stark in their depths. “Ash, I don’t feel so good. You think I broke my form?”

“I don’t know,” I told it, cradling its head and brushing grit from its face. “But if you did, we’ll get you another one just as nice.”

“I don’t think there is another one this nice. I’d like to save it if I could.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do. Nora, can you see my bag anywhere? We need to call the vet’s office and let them know we’ll be bringing Jim in.”

Nora picked her way across the debris to me, blood seeping from a couple of cuts on her arms. She started to search the area, froze, then spun around and faced where the nave used to be. The twisted metal and wood and stone were now reduced to nothing more than a gaping hole that spread from the floor up part of a back wall. Tipene and Gabriel were carrying Maata, smeared with blood and dust, to the nearest pew. Drake shouted orders to Kostya and István, the dragons calling back and forth as they investigated the ruined part of the chapel.

“Ash?” Jim’s breathing was raspy and labored. “Don’t tell anyone, but I think I’m a little bit scared. You’re not going to leave me, are you?”

“No, I won’t leave you,” I told it, my tears making little wet marks on its filthy coat. “You don’t have to be scared. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“Aisling, we have a problem,” Nora said quietly, still staring toward the nave.

Jim hiccuped a couple of times, its eyes rolling back in its head.

Anguish overwhelmed me as I watched him fight. I knew in my head that it was a demon, not a dog, but my heart told me that my friend was dying before my eyes.

“Noooo!” I wailed, as its body twitched, then went limp. “Goddamn it Jim, I order you to not die!”

“Aisling, you must come with me.”

Nora’s voice pierced my sobbing as I clutched Jim’s head, bawling into its neck.

“Jim’s dead,” I managed to get out, my body racked with grief so profound, I thought it would consume me.

“Aisling!” A sharp stinging blow to my face brought me out of the grief for a moment. I stared at Nora in stark disbelief. “Jim isn’t dead. It can’t die. You can summon it again once it picks a new form. Aisling, think! Jim is a demon! They cannot die! Its body is broken, that’s all.”

I looked down at the furry black form and saw the truth of what she was saying. The body wasn’t all of Jim…it was the outer shell, nothing more.

“We must go. Drake! Do not go in there! Something terrible has happened,” Nora urged.

“Jim is going to be so pissed,” I said slowly, allowing Nora to pull me to my feet. As I spoke the words, rage filled me, rage at whoever would do something so heinous as to arrange for a bomb to go off where innocent people and demons could be harmed.

Fire broke out around me.

“Come,” Nora said, taking my hand and urging me down the aisle toward the gaping hole. “We are needed.”

Her words penetrated the dense fog of my fury. I stumbled down the aisle after her, mentally squelching the fires I had inadvertently lit. “Needed? How?”

“Can’t you feel it?” she asked, skirting where Gabriel was working over Maata.

“Is she going to be OK?” I asked him, cringing at the sight of Maata’s injuries.

“Yes. Dragons are strong,” he said, giving me a weak smile. “Maata is the strongest of us all.”

I nodded and followed after Nora as she skirted a pile of debris and stepped over what remained of a mostly destroyed wall.

“What are you doing here?” Drake asked, crouched at the hole in the floor. He was clearly planning on jumping down into it. “I told you to stay back where it was safe.”

“In about thirty seconds, this church is going to be filled with imps, demons, and who knows what else,” Nora said, taking off her stained suit jacket.

His eyes widened as his gaze moved to me.

“Jim was crushed by one of the benches,” I told him, tears still sticky on my cheeks.

“You will get it back,” he said, before turning to Nora. “A portal has opened?”

“Yes. A very old one, by the feel of it. I will need Aisling to help me seal it.”

“It’s too dangerous. Kostya is down there now. He says there is an old crypt below the chapel.”

“I can’t do this alone,” Nora said, rummaging in her bag. She pulled out a small pink flashlight that she tucked into her shirt pocket before squatting on the edge of the hole.

“But…oh, god, Nora, there wasn’t time to tell you. I can’t help you,” I wailed, my heart breaking even more. “I wish to god I could, but I can’t!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I know you’ve not sealed a portal on your own before, but—”

“No, it’s not that!” I looked at Drake, his lovely eyes blurred as my own filled with tears again. “I would help you if I could, but I’m not a Guardian anymore!”

“You’re what?” she asked, shaking her head abruptly. “We do not have time for this. There are only a few minutes before the seal on that portal is breached, and then all hell will break loose. Literally!”

“I disavowed being a Guardian!” I yelled, clutching her arm and shaking it so she’d understand. “That was the sacrifice that Bael demanded. Don’t you see? I’m not a Guardian anymore! I can’t help you!”

“Don’t be ridiculous! No one can make you stop being a Guardian. It’s something you’re born to do! Vows have nothing to do with it.”

I thought my head would explode with astonishment. “They…can’t? Then why would Bael—”

“He’s a demon lord,” she snapped, swinging her legs over the edge.

Drake jumped down into the hole. It was about twelve feet deep, but he called up for her to ease herself down to his grasp.

“But…”

“If you aren’t a Guardian, how did you know the bomb was here? You sensed it long before I did, Aisling. You were born a Guardian, and you’ll be a Guardian to the end of your days. Now please, I do not have the abilities you have. You
must
help me!”

The truth washed over me in a cold wave, leaving me scrambling after her. Drake stood on a stone tomb, grabbing my legs as I slid myself down into the hole.

“I do not like this,” he said, helping me down off the tomb and onto a debris-covered floor.

“I have a torch,” Nora said. “This way, Aisling!”

I touched a small cut on his cheek. “I know. But I can’t leave Nora alone. I am a Guardian, after all.”

His fingers squeezed mine in acknowledgement as we followed the bobbing light. Kostya emerged from a side passage, taking up the rear.

“This is not a good situation,” he said.

“We will do the best we can,” Drake answered.

A feeling of dread seemed to leach off the walls and into my pores as we passed tomb after tomb, many of them partially broken, bones scattered across the floor. A faint glow of light pierced the darkness ahead, the weak circle from Nora’s flashlight jerking before it came to an abrupt stop.

“Oh, dear,” I heard her say.

Drake’s fingers tightened as he pulled me behind him. Kostya pushed his way past us both, his silhouette blocking most of the soft yellow light that seemed to pour out of a small doorway cut into the stone.

“Chuan Ren,” Kostya said, moving aside when Drake gave him a shove.

The name hung on the air for a moment. All my anger, all my frustration, all my sorrow and rage came back to me at the sight of the woman standing across a small room lit with portable camp lights.

She was behind this. She had killed Jim’s form. She had blown up a chapel full of innocent people in her attempt to destroy us. And she would not stop until she succeeded.

In the middle of the floor lay a circle created from dusty beige stone, its carvings so obliterated with time that they were almost impossible to make out, but I knew that what I was looking at was a sealed portal. But the seal on this one had been cracked, a piece of a stone lid from one of the tombs lying across it, no doubt knocked there by the force of the explosion above. A greenish black light glowed outward through the cracks, gaining strength with every passing second.

Beyond it, seven people stood. Chuan Ren was flanked on either side by three dragons—none of whom was her mate, I noted absently. I felt oddly relieved—I kind of liked Li, despite the fact that his mate was a homicidal maniac.

“You found us at last,” Chuan Ren said, glancing at her watch. “Seven minutes. I had expected you to find me in two.”

“I had other things of importance to concern me,” Drake said with deceptive mildness. I knew he was mad as hell. Even behind him, I could feel how tense and on edge he was, as if he was poised to attack.

“This portal’s seal has been compromised,” Nora said, stepping forward to wave at the broken stone circle. “I must seal it immediately or it will be opened permanently.”

Chuan Ren smiled at Nora, pulling out two wicked-looking curved swords. “I think not, Guardian. A portal right here will suit me very well.”

“Why?” I asked, squeezing between Kostya and Drake so I could see the seal better. Nora was right—the feeling of dread was coming from the portal, and it was increasing greatly with each breath I took. It was clearly about to break, and when it did…I refused to think of how many people would die in London alone if dark beings could pass through it at will. “Why do you want a portal opened? It can’t harm the green dragons.”

Her red lips curved into a cruel smile. “It can harm you, Aisling Grey.”

“I’m immortal,” I reminded her.

“You
can
be killed.”

“All I have to do is seal the portal. If not now, at some later date.”

Her smile widened. “I heard you were no longer a Guardian. How will you seal it?”

“Been talking to Bael, have you? Well, you heard wrong,” I answered, giving her a cold little smile of my own. “I’m still a Guardian, and I’m very, very angry. And guess who I’m angry at?”

She tossed her head. “You are nothing.”