Demon Forged

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