Demon Forged

the raw despair Irena had fought to keep in check welled up.
    Curling forward, she buried her face against his chest, holding in a scream of desolation. Death had been so close. If Jake had been a second later. If the nephil hadn’t looked to the side. She’d felt death at her back before, but never, never had it been so pointless and empty. Never had she stood to lose so much for nothing.
    Alejandro’s arms tightened around her. Her fingers bunched in his shirt.
    She had almost lost so much.
    Alejandro lifted her up against his chest. His wings formed. Silently, he turned toward the forge, and carried her into the air.

CHAPTER 15
    The moment Alejandro stepped over the threshold, he felt every second of the four hundred years he’d been gone.
    Everything was the same. The furnaces along the back wall. The central hearth that Irena kept lighted for no reason that he’d ever seen. The pantry and table that she’d used for guests, the hip bath. Centuries of footsteps had trampled the earthen floor into a surface as hard as stone.
    Everything was the same but them. The two Guardians who had left here together four hundred years ago were not the Guardians who returned.
    And when they left again, he vowed that something would be changed between them. They would not leave with everything unsettled.
    He paused a few steps inside. He turned away from the bed, though part of him wanted to settle that first—but not while she still shuddered with fear and relief. He moved toward the bath just as Irena lifted her head.
    “I need to wash,” she said.
    He nodded and set her down. Dru had vanished the blood. Irena probably didn’t know how she’d looked before that. Her face had been as crimson as the demon’s, painted with their blood and hers.
    But Irena wasn’t washing for that reason, he thought, pushing the tub closer to the wall and turning on the taps. A system of pipes ran from the cistern outside—one pipe heated by the furnaces so that hot water filled the tub. Four hundred years ago, he’d thought her bath was the most amazing luxury. They’d both used it often.
    Now, she climbed into the tub fully clothed and submerged herself completely. Taking solitude, Alejandro realized. Walking away and hiding her vulnerability, but this time without leaving.
    The quiet of the forge was only disturbed by the crackling of the fires, the steam in the pipes, the drip from the taps. He heard the indistinct beat of her heart, muffled by the water.
    He was glad of the moment to himself.
    As soon as Alejandro sank onto the sofa, shaking overtook him. A delayed reaction, he knew. He’d felt it before. When his youngest son had been eight, the boy had darted into the path of a galloping horse. Alejandro had seen him knocked beneath the pounding hooves. But when he’d pulled Eduardo from the ground, the boy hadn’t suffered more than muddied knees and a skinned elbow.
    It had been one of the few times in his life that Alejandro had raised his voice. He was not a man of violence, although he would use violence when duty demanded it. But that day, without demand or prompt, Alejandro had shaken and shouted at the boy until Eduardo had been in tears and trembling.
    Only afterward, when he’d been alone, had he fallen to his knees and thanked God.
    The sheer force of his will had prevented him from doing the same to Irena today. After the explosion, after he’d kissed her—it had taken all of his strength not to shake her. And as they’d waited for Dru to arrive, it’d taken all of his strength not to hold her to him and weep his thanks to God.
    He knew that modern science had given names to it. Adrenaline. Endorphins. Those chemicals might work the same in Guardians as in humans, when struck with the sheer terror of realizing how close his world had come to shattering.
    Irena, he thought, had realized it, too. She knew how close it had been.
    When his shakes eased, he rose to his feet to study the sculpture she’d left near the center of the forge. He’d wager that she’d made it after she’d left him at SI. He wished it gave him some insight into what her feelings had been. Had she begun to accept his decision? Or was her rejection still as strong?
    He fed the hearth fire, burning low in the shallow iron bowl set within a waist-high ring of stones, then wandered the room and examined the few changes she’d made. On a shelf sat a plastic winged monkey that was a recent gift from Drifter’s partner