The Guardian (12 page)

F
ala caught the gleam of Stephen's metallic eyes, raven hair. Movement drew her attention to the corner where Senator Kent occupied a chair, big as you please, looking smug, book in hand, as if she'd interrupted his reading. Stephen didn't appear so at ease, his shoulders tensed for combat, fists at his sides, legs splayed.

Kent shifted his head slightly as he gazed at her, and the dark brown of his eyes flipped to glowing red, a sign of the werewolf spirit, or Tumseneha's eyes. She couldn't tell. All three definitely inhabited Kent's human form, though. Nice trio.

“Fala, stay back,” Stephen ordered, shooting her the gimlet look of a dark guardian angel. “I've got this.”

“I told you to stay out of it.”

“I'm not.”

“This is all very touching.” Kent laid down the book
on a coffee table, picked a piece of lint from his tan khakis and flicked it away.

“Shut up.” Fala glared at Kent.

“Tsk, tsk. Is that any way to speak to me? This is my house, after all, and you've entered it illegally.”

“We have no boundaries in our realm and you know it.” Fala kept her pistol aimed at Kent.

He grinned, white teeth flashing, his expression benign, while his eyes sparked scarlet in chilling contrast. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about murdering innocents. Katrina Sanecki for one. Kent's wife for another.” She saw Stephen's brows snap together as if he wasn't aware of that one. “Not to mention the victims at the station you killed.”

He shook his head. “Yes, Katrina, what a shame.” He sounded bored as a lascivious gleam darkened the glimpses of bloodred in his eyes. “I had fun with her.”

“But not so much fun at the station, huh?” She remembered the SWAT sending him running.

He sighed in boredom. “Merely an imposition.”

“Cut the crap, Tumseneha.” Fala narrowed her eyes at Kent.

He laughed, a throaty, creeping thing that slithered over her nerves. “Well, all right, then, Tsimshian.” His tone had altered midsentence, multiplied to echoes of three: the human, the werewolf and the sorcerer twisted together, all rumbling within the same cords.

She didn't want to kill Kent, just to get to Tumseneha and the werewolf. Enough humans had lost their lives. When she looked at Stephen, he nodded in agreement.

She forced a deadly calm into her voice that she didn't
feel. “Why don't you stop hiding behind the human's body and face me—but oh, wait, I forgot, you've always been a
menyaha.
” She used the Patomani term for “coward.”

“And you and your kind are nothing but plagues upon the earth,” Kent's
Exorcist
voice boomed, even as his eyes turned to blazing fires. The skin on his face stretched, swelled with rage. “You'll die a slow, agonizing death, Tsimshian, I'll make sure of it.”

“But you'll still hide in human flesh and werewolf spirit while doing it, menyaha.”

Rage vibrated from Kent's body, Tumseneha's black aura a nova beneath the human tissue. It looked ready to implode at any moment. “Your pity for the human is admirable, but your mental tricks, shape-shifter, will not work on me.”

Fala saw Kent's flesh writhing, melting, peeling, the werewolf genesis that Tumseneha caused.

She knew if Kent's body shifted into werewolf form, then the senator could die, and he was the only blameless party in all of this. She had to stop Tumseneha before he completed the metamorphosis.

She called forth her power, felt the burst of energy from her center. Then the fearlessness of the Maiden Bear heart beat within her, louder, louder, until her skin melted and the bear form erupted with a blinding light. Magic power gyrated in her new form, all nine feet of it.

Even before she finished the transformation, she heard Stephen yell, “Fala, stay back!” He sped toward the Kent-Werewolf apparition.

If she'd been in human form she wouldn't have been
able to track his transmigration, but she had no trouble following with her Maiden Bear eyes.

Stephen dove straight at Kent with bullet speed as he tried to save Senator Kent's life.

Fala's heart leaped into her throat and she screamed, “No,” but the sound came out as a growl that shook the walls of the room.

Stephen passed through Kent, atoms colliding, energy bursting in a blue frothing nimbus. Stephen emerged on the other side, tearing a thrashing beast from Kent's body. Tumseneha.

She got her first raw view of the demon sorcerer, not the haunting nightmare illusions that she'd fought. Something much worse. A man's face, but with a wide mouth, forked tongue flicking out, pointed ears, horns protruding on either side of his forehead, scaly blackish-green muscled body, long tail, webbed feet and hands, both with long talons. A primordial stew of evil.

The werewolf spirit, free now, spewed from Kent's body, too. A transparency of fangs and muscles and claws without physical form materialized. Fala saw her chance to dispatch another werewolf and she spoke an ancient Patomani incantation.

As the sacred words left her mouth, a portal burst open, and one whole wall in the room spat and hissed and quavered with fire and brimstone and thick smoke, a glimpse into the hell of the underworld. The smoke curled and whirled and became a live writhing thing. It formed hands and long-fingered claws. They snapped out like hungry jaws, clamped around the werewolf's ankles and wrists. The werewolf spirit growled and fought like an animal caught in a trap. But it was no use. It was
sucked down into the portal. The opening slammed shut, then the wall appeared intact. Kent, Fala saw, lay unconscious on the floor, but she could hear his steady heartbeat.

Tumseneha bellowed in frustration when he realized that Stephen had separated him from Kent's body and he'd lost the werewolf spirit. The angry billow rattled windowpanes, shook lamps off tables, threw books off shelves, cracked plaster walls with the ease of an earthquake. The green veins beneath his skin popped and he swelled like a Gila monster. In one fearsome thrust, he broke Stephen's hold on his arms and sent him crashing through a table.

“You dare take me!” He raised his talons, curled them up to strike, and suddenly his form split into three black swarming masses that swirled, shifted and restructured into grotesque shapes.

Three monsters materialized all at once. An
andralia,
as her people knew it, with a lion's form and a dragon's curling tail. The second, a
derodihai,
its two alligator heads snapping at her from the shoulders of a man's scaly body, spittle dripping from its mouths. The last was shaped like a miniature pterodactyl, but with paper-thin bat wings about four feet wide from tip to tip. Purple veins throbbed beneath its paper thin dark gray skin. Her people knew this creature as the soul-stealer, or
raheena,
an underworld scavenger that fought Death for the souls of humans. Up until this moment she had believed it was only folklore. Tumseneha must have had the power to call them at will. His bag of tricks multiplied by the minute.

The raheena's many eyes glared at her as its wings
flapped, and Fala felt the hungry pull of the many orbs, even as the whoosh of its wings brushed past her. She also knew that a raheena went for the eyes of its victims, and if one managed to tear the orbs free, the creature captured the person's soul. All the eyes on its hideous body were trophies.

The raheena's myriad eyes turned toward Stephen in unison before swooping down on him. Fala wanted to help him, but the other two demons came at her.

The andralia lunged first.

Fala's powerful paws caught the creature in the throat, and she lifted it up and flung it against the wall. The derodihai rushed at her from the side.

One of the mouths gouged her shoulder.

She found an opening and bit through the neck of the other head. A screech issued from its huge mouth as the head rolled off the body and plopped to the floor, its green blood spewing in all directions. The jaws kept snapping on the floor.

Before Fala could dispatch the derodihai, the andralia countered again, sprang on her with its powerful body and weight, and knocked her into the sofa. When lion and bear hit, splinters and fabric and stuffing flew in all directions. Fala kept her hold on the half-lion-half-dragon beast, and they both crashed to the floor. The lion jaws attacked, fangs sinking deep into her shoulder. Then the derodihai joined in the fray.

 

In all Stephen's years at BOSP, he'd never seen beings like this. Vamps, werewolves, poltergeists, demons, run-of-the-mill killers he could handle but these things looked like they'd emerged right out of Dante's
Inferno.
He wouldn't have believed it if one of them wasn't diving at him.

The beast swooped down. A spear of eyes swam before him and long talons clamped at his face, going for his eyes.

He concentrated and in a blink drew energy from the very molecules of air around him until he held a glowing sphere of pure atomic energy. He threw the burning sphere. It hit the creature square in the chest.

The winged devil buckled and rolled. Its wings crimped but still beat like a vampire's. Before it hit the ceiling, it hover-swooped, then circled around for a second dive at him.

Stephen formed another energy ball, a larger one, all of his mental powers centered in it. This time he transported up under the creature before he fired. Beneath the batlike skin on the chest, he saw the green heart beating and aimed for it.

The creature careened back, squealing, then crashed into a window. Glass exploded, and so did the being. A humming black cloud of magic swarmed, then flowed out through the jagged broken glass.

Stephen found Fala. Her bear form rolled on the ground, wrestling with the lion creature, fierce jaws and claws gnashing. The one-headed alligator creature snapped at Fala's form when he found an opening. Blood spewed from the bites all over her body. Oh, God. She couldn't fight them both without losing.

Stephen ran up behind the alligator thing, grabbed it from behind. It hissed and snorted and jerked, but Stephen had its one head in a forearm lock. One fast twist and he cracked its neck.

The being dissolved into a teeming black mist right between his arms, then it flowed out the broken window into the night.

Stephen saw the lion going for Fala's throat, so he teleported in between them to shield Fala.

Pain tore into his ribs as massive jaws lifted him up and flung him side to side like a rag doll. He fought the blinding agony, the tearing of bone and flesh as he grabbed the skin at the back of the lion's neck and yanked.

The head snapped around and it dropped him. As he fell Stephen caught its jaws between both hands. The fetid odor of rotting flesh blew from its mouth as he pulled with all his supernatural strength. Bone cracked. The animal's demon-red eyes rolled back in its head, then it screamed in agony as the jawbone ripped loose.

The creature roared in anguish, then it, too, dissolved into black beelike vapor. It was the last thing Stephen saw before the pain overwhelmed him and he fell on top of Fala.
Oh, God! Let her live.
He no longer cared if he survived. Just let her be okay. He felt the warmth of Fala's soft fur against his cheek as everything went black.

F
ala tasted her own blood, mixed with that of the derodihai's. She felt Stephen's weight on top of her. He'd saved her life, no doubt, for up until this actual moment she'd never felt the limits of her own powers. She hated to admit it, but Meikoda was right; Fala was no match for Tumseneha, not until she became Guardian. She knew with the same certainty that the Earth revolves around the sun that Tumseneha would regroup and attack again, and he wouldn't stop until there were no Guardians left. She realized now that her place was on the reservation. It had been her pride and stubbornness and unwillingness to give up her present life that brought her to this point—brought both of them here.

Tears stung Fala's eyes as she reached up to touch Stephen's back. She owed him her life.

He had fallen on her so that his chest almost lay across her neck. Something warm and sticky oozed between
them and had settled in her fur. The scent of blood inundated her heightened senses. Was he still alive? Not knowing terrified her.

Agonizing darts of torment shot through her whole body, her open flesh like raw hamburger from the bites. She had to shift back before she lost consciousness. She spoke a magic spell. Sealing, sterilizing heat vibrated through her body, rising, expanding, heaving from her core. She winced at the pain as her flesh began to shift and mold and heal itself. Her spine stiffened, and she sucked in her breath as the heat built until she wanted to scream from it. In a burst of flaming energy, she shifted back into her own skin and clothes.

Stephen's limp body felt like rocks on top of her. He was, indeed, a true warrior—her own guardian and protector. He saved her, but had he paid the ultimate price?

She prayed with all her heart that he'd been spared the sting of death. She supported his shoulders and carefully rolled him down her chest and sat up.

The full extent of the damage he'd suffered made her breath turn to frost and her chest ache. His shirt was nothing but jagged shreds on his right side. The flesh there lay torn open and bleeding. Chunks of broken ribs jutted from the gaping wounds. Blood covered him and her, too.

Her hand trembled as she felt the spot over his heart…

A steady beat.

She let out the breath she'd been holding.

She slid her legs out from beneath his back and eased out from under him.

Even unconscious, his face contorted in agony. She saw his hands, the wide puncture marks where he'd grabbed the andralia's jaws and pried them open.

Fala laid down beside him, feeling the warm stickiness of his blood against her shirt and jacket. She gathered him in her arms like she'd done with Joe. She pressed her body tight to his, and she called all her healing powers to the fore. Then she kissed him. His lips felt dry and cold to her. She forced her spirit into him, but it bounced back at her and caused her whole body to rock backward. She couldn't penetrate the barrier of magic around him.

She broke the kiss and knew she had one other place to turn.

“Is there something I can do?”

The bewildered male voice made her jump. She glanced over her shoulder at Senator Kent, dispossessed, the man himself left to face what Tumseneha had made him do. His face was drawn, his eyes etched with sunken agony. Of course, he remembered what had happened. Tumseneha would never have wiped the senator's memory clean, because the more pain he caused the better he liked it. And the anguish lay in Kent's eyes like a shroud. She could give him some comfort and expunge his memory, but she couldn't give him back his wife.

“Yes,” she nodded, “I need some sheets for bandages.”

“I can call 911.”

“No, sir, you can't, unless you're willing to explain what happened.”

The senator's eyes turned even more haunted, more drawn, more lost. Tears glistened in his eyes, and his
Adam's apple worked up and down. His whole body began to shake. “My wife…my wife.”

“I'm so sorry.” She touched his hand and a frizz of power jumped from her fingers into him. “Get the bandages, and you'll remember prowlers breaking into your home. They tied you up; then took your wife into another room to torture her. You'll only remember her screams and your own feeling of helplessness. You'll remember nothing else.” She would have to leave him tied up and call the police before she left.

“Okay.” He nodded, then turned like a robot and went in search of the sheets.

Fala grabbed a pillow that had fallen off the overturned couch and pressed it against Stephen's wounded side to slow the blood loss. She knew if she couldn't heal him with her power, an emergency room full of doctors didn't have a chance. No, this impenetrable philter protecting him couldn't be broken. His only chance was Meikoda. If anyone had the power to break past the barrier, it was the current Tsimshian. Fala looked down at his pale face, his long lashes spanned across his cheeks, his mouth tight against the pain. She bent and kissed his clammy lips, murmuring, “Stay with me, Stephen. I need you.”

Stephen regained consciousness long enough to hear the words “I need you.” He lapsed back into darkness and he didn't mind falling into the black pit. She was alive and she needed him.

 

After Fala called the police and managed to get Stephen in her car, it was close to seven before she reached the reservation. She still felt sorry for Senator Kent. She had erased as much of his memory as she
could, enough to convince the police that it was intruders who had killed his wife. But the nightmares and dreams would remain and never go away.

She'd left him tied up so the police would believe Kent's story, though forensics would go nuts when they found long shaggy Ursidae hair and blood, and Stephen's DNA. She knew for a fact a warlock's blood had a few too many chromosome chains to appear totally human and therefore was a mystery to forensic scientists. Luckily, the three demons' green and purple blood had fizzed and melted with them. But between her and Stephen it would be enough to stump the detectives.

The reservation's three hundred acres butted the Pamunkey River. The entrance was tricky at night. No signs announced it, only a gravel road. She located the road by looking for the No Trespassing, No Soliciting, No Loitering sign that screamed
Violators beware—we don't want you here.

She found it and passed open fields and wooded ones and many small homes belonging to her people. When she reached the house Akando shared with his family, she avoided looking at it.

Her grandmother's rancher sat at the end of the reservation, the Pamunkey River her backyard border. It followed the main road, and in between scudding clouds the icy river shimmered like black diamonds. When Fala reached Meikoda's drive, she whipped the Bug into it. The Depression-era bungalow rose up before her like a gingerbread house, brown with white spindled trim, with neatly trimmed hedgerows. In the front yard a purple-martin hotel of gourds hung from a tall pole and clacked harshly in the winter air. An herb garden rested vacant
and icy on the side of the ten-acre parcel. Home. The only one she'd known growing up, but it felt foreign to her right now.

She'd called Meikoda and alerted her that she was on her way, and welcoming lights burned in every window and shot rays over the frozen yard.

The curtains in the living-room window moved. Nina's pixie face squinted at her, then disappeared.

Seconds later Meikoda, Takala and Nina appeared. Takala and Nina took their grandmother's arm and helped her down the icy front porch steps. By the time they reached the car, Fala was already out and opening the passenger-side door.

“Help me,” Fala said, reaching in to grab Stephen's limp body.

“Move.” Takala pushed Fala aside and hefted Stephen up in her arms as if he were a child who had fallen asleep.

“Be careful,” Fala warned.

“She has the legs of a ram,” Meikoda said, surveying the depth of concern on Fala's face.

“And the brain of an ass,” Nina added, anger teeming in her normally mellow voice.

Fala had never heard such venom from Nina, and she wondered what had brought it about.

“Lay off, Nina,” Takala warned, glaring at her sister while she stomped up the steps, Stephen's feet swinging and hitting her thigh.

Nina shot back, “I won't.”

Meikoda interrupted them. “You are sisters. You share the same blood. There'll be no more arguing.”

Fala wanted to ask what was wrong but knew it
would prolong the argument, so she remained quiet as she grabbed Meikoda's arm and steadied her on the icy steps.

Nina opened the screen door and held it while Takala stepped through with her two-hundred-pound package. Takala gave her a thank-you snarl. Nina rolled her eyes in reply.

“Put him in Fala's room,” Meikoda said.

The familiar smell of baked bread, eucalyptus, animal fat and herbs wafted through the air, all smells from her childhood. Though she loved them, they brought a lump inside her throat, for they were the smells of constraint, of duty, of a course set for her life. She looked at Stephen being carried in Takala's arm, and tears stung her eyes.

They followed Takala down a small hall. Fala's bedroom was at the end. She'd forgotten how small it was, hardly ten by eleven feet. It seemed even smaller now with everyone piling into it. Her handprints dotted the lemon-yellow walls in rainbow colors, a decorating scheme she'd chosen at age six. A yard-sale twin bed and dresser filled the rest of the room, along with a few scatter rugs in fuzzy feet shapes.

Takala laid Stephen on the twin bed.

Meikoda stepped over, pressed her fingers against his carotid artery. “He is still alive.”

“Please help him,” Fala said, not guarding the anxiety in her words.

Meikoda pulled off the trench coat that Fala had thrown over Stephen's shoulders. She lifted the bloodstained, shredded shirt, then peered down at the bandages Fala had wound around his chest and side. She laid her hands
on the wounded side, where the bloodstains had turned into wide pools. “You say a derodihai attacked him?”

“Yes. Tumseneha called one forth and shifted into it. I've never seen anything like it. He turned into three devils all at once.”

“Mere child's play for Tumseneha.” The loathing in Meikoda's soul for the sorcerer rang in her voice. “I have seen worse.” Her eyes turned haunted as she recalled a memory. “When I banished him long ago, he almost killed me with his shifting tricks.” She shook her head, the bun of gray at her nape bobbing. “He is cunning, to be sure. It is a miracle you and this man are still alive.”

“Can you heal him?”

“I can but try.” The wrinkles on Meikoda's face stretched and lifted and arched as she concentrated. White light glowed from her center, then a powerful sun-bright radiance burst out into the room. Fala squinted against the glare and watched as it frizzed up into Meikoda's arms, down into her hands.

When the healing light hit Stephen, his body rocked like he had just received an electrical hit from a heart paddle.

Meikoda recoiled as her own power came back to her. She rubbed her hands as if they hurt and said, “I cannot get through the blood-binding spell blocking his essence. It is powerful.”

“What kind is it?”

“I don't know.”

“But you have to heal him.” Fala's voice broke with emotion and frustration.

Meikoda's lips stretched into rigid narrow lines. “You give yourself away, Granddaughter.”

“He saved my life.”

“And took your heart.” Meikoda shook her head at the misfortune of Fala's folly, her familiar judgmental expression firmly etched in her face.

Had he taken her heart? No way! She didn't love him. She couldn't. “No, that's not true. I owe him my life. That's all.”

“Believe what you will.” Meikoda arched her chin, stretching the wattle below, her iridescent bright blue eyes taking Fala's full measure. “It matters not now.”

Fala grasped at any help now. “What about the elders? Your combined strength?”

Meikoda thought a moment, then she nodded, the wrinkles along her neck bobbing. “We can try. I will summon the elders. Takala, take him to the cave. Fala, you will need to prepare the altar. Nina, stay with the stranger.” Fala nodded.

“His name is Stephen Winter.”

Meikoda waved a dismissive hand through the air; his name didn't matter. Then with an arthritic limp she left the room.

“Thank you,” Fala called at her back.

She merely grunted a reply as if it was too late for gratitude, a grunt that said Fala had messed up again, and it had to be cleaned up. Miss Screwup strikes again.

Nina touched Fala's shoulder. “Maybe he'll be okay.”

Takala angrily pointed at Stephen. With her sandy blond hair hanging wild around her shoulders, her multicolored eyes flashing, a warrior's tenseness in her body, she looked like a lioness defending a cub. “How
could you fall in love with him? You're supposed to marry Akando.”

“I didn't.” Fala threw in too much anger and emphasis in her words.

“Oh, no. Well, it's pretty obvious. It's written all over you.” She waved an angry hand at Fala's face. “Deny it all you like, but it's so wrong. Who knows, he may be paying for your mistake with his life. When he's ready to be moved, call me.” Takala stalked from the room, leaving a teeming agitation in her wake.

“Maybe it is my fault.” Fala looked down at Stephen's handsome, pale face and felt a horrible tugging at her heart.

“She's so insensitive. Don't listen to her. She's only hurting because she loves Akando.”

“Why were you arguing?”

“Because she refuses to admit she loves him. It's the first step in healing her heart. But she refuses.”

“After the ceremony is over, she'll finally admit it.” Fala gulped at the thought. The solstice was three days away. She would have to marry Akando soon after it. Being back at the reservation made it feel so binding, so stifling. Bands clamped around her ribs as she reached over and stroked Stephen's cheek. Emotion knotted her throat and she hurried from the room before the tears came.