Light My Fire (19 page)

“Now
this
is what I’m talking about!” I did a little victory dance as I dispatched the last blight hound, its body
turning into a puff of nasty-smelling black smoke that
hung heavily in the air. I twirled around to make sure that
there were no more little nasties hiding anywhere, but
Nora had rousted out the last of them. “Woohoo, we
rock!”

Jim collapsed next to an overturned table, its tongue
lolling to the ground as it panted, giving me an intolerant
look. “Jeez, woman, get a grip. It was just a few blight
hounds, not the princes of Abaddon themselves.”

I jumped over a stack of boxes containing clunky dot-
matrix printers, pausing to give Jim a well-deserved pat on the head. “Cut me a little slack, OK? It was my first
official infestation, and I’m celebrating. How did I do, Nora? I felt good. I felt in control, and even when that
big herd rushed me and I got a little frenzied with the
binding wards—sorry about freezing you, Jim, that was
totally unintentional—it didn’t take me long to get the sit
uation back under control.”

Nora poked a stack of discarded furniture to make sure
no blight hounds remained, straightening up to dust off
her hands and smile. “You did very well, as a matter of
fact. You kept your head despite overwhelming circum
stances.”

Even though I was filthy with dirt from the abandoned
platform, and covered in demon smoke grit, I glowed
with happiness from her praise.

“There is the little matter of the fire,” she added, hesitating.

“I put that right out. As soon as I saw the furniture on fire, I doused the flame.” A pang of guilt zinged through
me as I glanced down the platform where the charred bits
of rubble remained, the wall now stained black with
smoke.

“Yes, you did.” Nora continued to hesitate. I stood be
fore her, anxious to know how my first outing as a
Guardian trainee had gone, worried by her obvious reluc
tance to speak.

“But?” I prodded her, my heart sinking as her smile
faded.

“That wasn’t actually the fire I was speaking about.”
She looked uncomfortable for a moment, which made me
feel even more uneasy. “Are you aware that when you
draw a ward, you invoke dragon fire?”

I frowned, mentally going over the ward-drawing process.
“No, I wasn’t. I draw the pattern you showed me, add my
own little bit, and imbue it with my belief in my powers
and abilities, just as you told me. I don’t see where it is
I’m drawing on Drake’s fire.”

She pointed at rat that peeked out from under a stack of garbage. “Draw a binding ward on that rat.”

“OK.” I took a deep breath, focused, and drew a sym
bol in the air that would, when combined with my force
of will, bind the rat to the spot.

The ward glowed red in the air for a second, then faded
into nothing. The rat gave a squeak of surprise as it tried
to scurry away. I started to turn away, but a slight flicker
caught my eye. To my surprise, fire suddenly flared to life
in the form of the ward I’d just drawn, sending the rat be
neath it into a frenzy of horror.

“Oh, my god!” I ran over, ignoring my dislike of ro
dents to snatch the rat out of harm’s way, swatting out the
fire after I released the terrified rat. “I had no idea! I
didn’t see any fire with the blight hounds but the one on
the furniture ...”

“I believe it manifests itself when you cement the
ward with your will,” she mused, giving me a thoughtful
look. “By the time you’ve done that and the fire mani
fests, you’ve moved on to the next being demanding your attention.”

I glanced back at the charred wood. “Ugh. Now I’m a
pyromaniac.”

“Nothing so serious, although you will probably want
to learn how to empower your wards without drawing on
fire.”

Jim snorted. “As if.”

I didn’t say anything as I followed Nora and Jim out of
the tube station. Jim’s words echoed in my head with
worrisome intensity. What if my demon was right? What
if I couldn’t draw a ward without pulling on Drake’s fire? I struggled with the need to keep the Guardian part of
myself separate from Drake.

If I couldn’t do this on my own, what did that say about my abilities?

12

“Salut.
You would like a ride, yes?”

We stopped at the top of the stairs that led down into
the tube station. Next to us, blithely parked in a tow-away zone, a man sat smiling at us from the confines of a black
taxi.

I wasn’t surprised to see him any more than I was to see he’d acquired a new taxi. “Hi, Rene. We’re only a couple of blocks from our new home, but sure, a ride
would be nice. And maybe if you have the time, you can
come in and say hi to Drake and his men.”

Nora greeted Rene and happily climbed into the taxi
after Jim.

“It would be my pleasure, but is that not one of
Drake’s men there? Perhaps he would like to join you?” Rene nodded toward the doorway of a small art gallery.

I turned to look. I didn’t see Pal or Istvan. “One of
Drake’s men?”

“I cannot be certain, not having met all of them, but I did see a dragon slip into the gallery. I assumed he was
watching you.”

“Dammit, Drake agreed to trust me.... I’ll be right
back. Just let me go tell whichever of them it is that the
jig’s up, and we’ll go home.” I marched into the gallery, mentally rehearsing the righteously indignant lecture I
would give Drake. A quick scan of the main room showed
it dragonless. I hurried through the other three, smaller,
rooms, but none of them held anything but browsing
artists and patrons.

It really wasn’t worth pursuing Pal or Istvan just to tell them I knew they were following me, but my pride was irked. Probably they’d seen me come into the gallery and
were hiding from me... which irked me even more.
After checking to make sure no one was around to see
me, I slipped through a door marked
private
and found
myself in an apparently empty office.

I walked into the room, my hands on my hips. “All right, I know you’re in here; you can stop
...
oh, god.”

An odd whooshing noise interrupted me, but it was the sharp blow of pain in my back and odd burning feeling in
my stomach that had me looking down.

The long, curved blade of a sword emerged from my
front.

“Holy shit,” I swore, my brain shocked into numbness
as I tried to absorb the fact that there was a sword stick
ing through me.

A voice behind me snarled something in a guttural lan
guage. I spun around and was knocked backwards by a blow to the face. I managed to twist and land on my side
rather than my back, some instinct of preservation keeping
me from driving the sword any farther through my body.

Above me stood a dragon, all right. But it wasn’t one
of Drake’s men. This dragon was Chinese and wore a
black leather jacket with a red bandanna tied around his face. In his left hand he held a starlike spiky weapon that
he aimed at my heart.

“No!” I shrieked at the red dragon, frantically trying to
roll out of the way. The blade sticking through me made
it difficult to move. My mind was shrieking all sorts of warnings and orders, all of them conflicting and sending
me quickly toward a full-fledged panic attack. With a
desperation born of frenzy, I opened the door in my head,
pulling on Drake’s fire to give me strength. A fireball the
likes of which I had never seen formed in front of me and
hurled at the red dragon.

It was then I realized my mistake. Fighting a dragon
with fire was like adding gasoline to a blaze. The dragon
laughed for a moment, then absorbed the fire and lifted
his hand to throw the weapon at me. I cursed my foolishness, hurling a chair at him as I dragged my wounded self
behind the safety of the desk. The dragon said something
in Chinese, destroying the chair with a couple of deft
moves.

I started drawing a binding ward on him, hoping to
slow him down so I could get out of the room and get
some help, but I didn’t finish it before he grabbed me by
my hair and yanked me up next to him.

“You die now,” he snarled, his eyes glowing reddish brown as he spun the throwing star in the air, snatching it
back to press against my jugular.

“I’m immortal,” I gasped, my right hand trying to fin
ish the ward.

“You can die,” he answered. A moment later, the door
burst open
...
but it wasn’t help that swarmed into the
room in a violent yellow wave.

“Oh, god, it’s the imps,” I moaned, wondering which
of them—the red dragon or the imps—would finish me
off first.

As soon as that morbid thought formed in my head,
self-preservation kicked in and I slammed another bolt of
fire into the red dragon, sending him flying back onto the mass of imps. Imps being what they are, they stopped to
attack the dragon rather than continue past him for me. I’ll always be grateful for that fact, because it gave me time to scramble over the desk, using another chair to
break the window that led to a small service alley behind th
e gallery.

The dragon was screaming out curses as he beat the
imps off him, but more were pouring in through the door.
I didn’t wait around to see what happened. Careful of the
sword still jutting from my belly, I got out the window
and dropped to the ground. The impact sent me to my
knees, but it took me only a couple of seconds before I was racing down the alley, praying Rene would still be
out in front of the building. I hurled myself around the
corner into the mass of people streaming out of the tube station, ignoring the cries of surprise around me as people noticed the sword. Ahead of me sat a black taxi with
an open door. I lunged to it, half falling inside it with a
sob of gratitude on my lips.

“Oh, thank god. You have no idea how grateful I am to
see you. A red dragon tried to kill me, and the imps found
me, and I have a sword sticking out of me!”

I allowed helpful hands to pull me off the floor of the
taxi to the seat, turning as the taxi shot forward.

The eyes I met as I pushed my hair out of my face
were not the ones I was expecting.

“Who are you?” I asked the blond woman who sat next
to me.

“My name is Obedama. I am servant of the lord Ari
ton. You are summoned before him, Guardian.”

“Ariton? The demon lord Ariton?” I ripped the bottom of my shirt to carefully wad around where the sword protruded. Part of my mind was still coping with the fact that
I’d been skewered (and survived), but the rest of it had
moved on without anything but a passing thought that
it was odd I wasn’t feeling more pain. The wound bled,
but not copiously so. It hurt, but not to the exclusion of
thought.

“Aye. We will go there now.”

“Wait a second.” I waved a hand around vaguely as the
woman nodded to the taxi driver. “You’ll have to forgive
me, but I’m a bit woozy from loss of blood, not to men
tion having just barely survived an attack by a warring dragon and homicidal imps. Why on earth does a demon
lord want to see me?”

The female demon—for that’s what the woman had to
be—looked at me for the count of three, then turned its
head.

I was reminded that demons don’t have to answer
questions asked by anyone but those to whom they owed
allegiance or who summoned them. I toyed with the idea of summoning this one but discarded that plan for two
reasons—first, I didn’t have the tools on me to call up a
demon, and second, I had a vague memory of Jim telling
me it couldn’t nark on its demon lord to anyone.

Jim! Why hadn’t I thought of my furry little demon?
“Effrijim, I summon thee.”