Demon Marked

was only just past midnight in New York, given the time change, he’d essentially remained awake until dawn.

“All right.” Ash turned the key. With a few beeps and chimes, the dashboard computer started up.

The screen had a map. She didn’t know how to use that.

“Where do I go?”

“West on Interstate 80, then north to Minnesota. We’ll stop in Duluth before we head up to her parents’ house.”

It would take a full day to drive that distance. “Why not just fly there?”

Nicholas opened his eyes and scanned her expression, as if to determine whether she was serious. He must have realized she was. Tiredly, he scrubbed his hand over his face and closed his eyes again.

“Why not just e-mail our destination to the Guardians and save them the trouble of trying to find us?”

Ah, yes. The Guardians. He hadn’t had time to tell her about them before, but they had twelve hundred miles to kill now—and a tired man could still talk.

She checked traffic and pulled out into the lane. “So who are the Guardians?”

“Warriors with angelic powers. They were all human once, but they were transformed after sacrificing themselves to save someone else. I don’t know the full story—I just know what matters: Guardians kill demons.”

Oh, fun. They sounded almost as likable as Nicholas. “I can’t wait to meet one,” Ash said dryly.

A low, rough sound made her glance over. Was that a laugh? She hoped he hadn’t hurt himself.

He caught her look. The laugh receded into a wry nod of acknowledgment. “I’m tired.”

“I’ll remember that exhaustion makes you more vulnerable.” Just like a good demon would, surely. “So, Guardians kill demons. Why?”

“Because you’re determined to destroy everything human.”

Ash shook her head. “But I’m not. I don’t recognize anything of myself in that description.”

“Your memory—”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I don’t remember learning to drive, either. But some things feel familiar—and destroying humanity doesn’t.”

He rubbed his face again. “Look. This is what I know: Demons are evil. You were angels, but you rebelled, went to war in Heaven, and got your heads smashed in by the good angels. After that, you were transformed into demons and thrown into Hell. Now you all fuck with human souls, trying to damn us to the Pit, and follow Lucifer.”

Lucifer.

Memory surfaced, hot and sharp as a blade. A dark figure. Raging pain. I name you Ash—

Then he’d ripped her apart. Lucifer had ripped her apart.

Terror closed her throat. She remembered that. His horrible voice. Ah, God, she could almost hear it now. Shredding everything she was, everything she’d been.

A scream clawed inside her chest. She bit it back, suppressing the tremors, her hands clenching on the steering wheel.

“Does it sound more familiar now?”

Nicholas’s voice dragged her out of the memory. She glanced over and found him watching her, his eyes tired, but just as sharp.

Ash struggled for breath to reply. It took several tries. Finally, she admitted, “A little.”

The Special Investigations warehouse in San Francisco housed their official law enforcement offices and less-official novice training quarters. Though Guardians could travel directly from Caelum using a Gate that led into the hall near the gymnasium, most of them avoided it—which was probably why Rosalia hadn’t used it, either. The Gate had been created after a Guardian had sacrificed herself to save one of the novices a year ago; her death was too fresh for most of the Guardians here, and using the Gate seemed to trample on her memory.

Fortunately, Michael still allowed Taylor to teleport to Special Investigations—and if not for Michael, she’d have likely been living at the warehouse full-time, along with the other novices. Taylor could fight, she could shoot, but her skills were nothing against the abilities and speed of a demon . . . until Michael took over.

As frustrating as that was, Taylor had to be grateful for it, too. She’d have gone mad, cooped up in the warehouse instead of working in the field. Most Guardians had trained for a hundred years before they’d been allowed to fight a demon. Now, because they were so strapped for manpower, a Guardian might start working after only four or five decades of training, but that was still too long to wait.

So Taylor trained herself in the basic Guardian stuff like flying, shape-shifting, and weapons—she didn’t always want to rely on Michael—but she worked, too. Her job tracking down demons wasn’t much different than the one she’d had as an inspector in the San Francisco Police Department. She just lied a lot more, had a worldwide jurisdiction, covered up evidence instead of unearthing it, and when she located a demon, she tossed away anything resembling a fair trial and went straight to capital punishment.

All of that had gone against the grain when she’d begun, but the more demons she met, the more she saw the necessity of it. Demons didn’t play by manmade rules; they played with them. So Guardians did the same. The difference was, Guardians tried not to hurt anyone while they did it.

Which, when it came down to it, was really the same as the spirit of human laws: Try not to fuck other people over or hurt anyone. If you do, you pay for it.

Simple, really.

Taylor mentally swept the building as soon as she teleported into the large hub at the heart of the warehouse—a habit she’d picked up from Michael, but now, apparently, she did on her own. Since the sun was up, no vampires were working, though she sensed a few sleeping upstairs. Most of the Guardians’ minds were shielded, but a few sent a little mental probe in return; since they couldn’t actually send thoughts, only project emotions and images, that psychic touch was the equivalent of a Hello.

A little disappointed that she couldn’t sense Joe Preston, her former partner on the force and now a human working for SI in almost the same capacity that she did, Taylor headed for the director’s offices, instead. She missed Joe, though she understood why they weren’t paired up on assignments; Michael or not, it would be like putting two novices together. Maybe when she had a few more years under her belt . . .

Of course, in a few more years, Joe would hit retiring age. God, that was crazy to think about. Something that she didn’t want to think about. Taylor knew she was lucky—a hundred years of training meant that most Guardian novices never saw their family and friends again—but she didn’t know how well she’d take immortality when she saw her mother, her partner, and her brother aging themselves to death.

Maybe Michael could help her deal with that, too. He’d seen hundreds of human generations grow old and die.

Aaaaaand, no. That thought didn’t help at all.

Shaking away the morbidity of it, Taylor rapped on the director’s office door.

Her hope that a male voice would answer was dashed when Lilith called for her to enter. Crap. Taylor got along a little better with Hugh Castleford, a former Guardian who now shared the office with Lilith and served as a codirector when he wasn’t training the novices. This obviously wasn’t one of those times.

Lilith sat behind her big desk, and didn’t glance up from her computer when Taylor came in. She must have had an outside meeting today. Instead of the leather pants and corset that Lilith usually wore, she appeared as she had the first time Taylor had met her: in a severely cut pantsuit, with her long black hair in a tight roll at her nape, and the bulge of her weapon just visible beneath her jacket.

Lilith had been an FBI agent then, and she’d deliberately fucked one of Taylor and Joe’s murder investigations into a humping, unrecognizable mess.

Taylor still couldn’t bring herself to like the woman, though she’d grudgingly come to respect her. Two thousand years old, Lilith had once been a demon halfling—a human who’d been given a demon’s powers through a sick ritual of symbols carved into flesh, bloodletting, and a vow to serve Lucifer. Almost every halfling disappointed him, however, and so they’d all ended up in the frozen field . . . all of them except for Lilith. A master of lies and