Demon Forged

trained a novice slower than Dru,” Irena said.
    “Nothing I said made her move faster. She couldn’t land a punch or a kick. I would chop off pieces of her, and instead of moving out of the way, she would just pick them back up and put them back on. She’d tell me she hated rushing around for no reason.”
    Michael arrived, teleporting into the north end of the terrace. Ames-Beaumont was with him, his eyes haunted, his beautiful face tired. The vampire paused, as if uncertain where he should stand. Selah beckoned to him.
    Khavi teleported in behind Michael, wearing a simple white shift. The Doyen met Irena’s gaze, and nodded for her to continue.
    Irena wiped at her eyes. “I told her not to be stupid, of course, because if she was slow she’d just end up dead. At our next practice, she arrived with those red tennis shoes on. And she told me—” She began shaking with laughter, and for a second couldn’t speak. “She told me that not only would they make her faster, but so fast that the only way her opponent would see her coming was by looking for the streak of bright red. And I was laughing so hard . . . I didn’t see her coming. With one kick, she crushed four of my ribs and my right arm, then followed through with a roundhouse that broke my cheekbone, my jaw, knocked out half my teeth and popped my right eye out of its socket.”
    Stunned silence fell, which made Alejandro’s soft laughter seem loud. Shaking his head, Michael broke into a grin. A muffled snicker came from somewhere to her left. Within seconds, it was difficult to separate those who laughed from those who wept.
    “In sixteen hundred years, no novice has ever gotten the drop on me like that. But Dru wasn’t done.” She choked on another laugh, wiped her eyes again, drew a breath. “She put her foot on the back of my neck, and held me down while she healed each bone and each tooth, one by one. She took about a half an hour; my eye had almost healed on its own by then. And she told me she was just teaching me the difference between slow when it mattered, and when it didn’t. Then she said that when someone needed her to save them, she’d be fast enough.” Irena looked over at Pim, who watched her with wet cheeks and shining eyes. “And she was.”
    At some gatherings, a heavy quiet stretched between the memories. Not this one. Drifter immediately stepped forward to fill it. Irena leaned back into Alejandro, and listened to Drifter’s long, lazy tale from a century before that ended with Dru swearing off men and kicking him out of her bedroom, where he’d landed, “right about thereabouts.” He’d pointed to where the novices stood, which seemed to signal to Becca that it was her turn.
    Not everyone shared their stories; Irena shared several. Michael did, Alice, even Ames-Beaumont. Each one gave her more of Dru, and reminded her of how much she liked the Guardians here, whether from their memories or their reactions to the stories they heard. And when Alejandro offered his, she not only had more of Dru, but something of Olek from the years they’d kept apart.
    No gathering would be worthy of Dru, or capture what she’d been to any of them; but by the end, Irena thought it had spoken well of them, too. Perhaps that was why Michael had begun the tradition.
    She looked across the terrace at him as Guardians slowly began to leave. He met her eyes, then made his way across the terrace toward their small group. Khavi walked beside him, frowning. She said something to him in the demon language; Irena couldn’t understand it, but Alice stiffened.
    Michael stopped. His eyes shifted to obsidian. His black wings formed. They opened, the feathers appearing to absorb the light from Caelum’s sun. Sweeping down, his enormous wings launched him straight into the air.
    Irena watched him rise and fly beyond sight past the wall of the tower. “What did she say, Alice?”
    “She said, ‘Will you not sing? Much time will pass before she hears your voice again.’ ”
    She? Irena feared Khavi hadn’t meant Dru.
    Alejandro pulled in a sharp breath. Her heart a tight knot, she turned to look at him, saw the same dread. “Caelum’s voice,” he murmured.
    By the gods—the prophecy. What had it said? The dragon will rise before the lost two. The blood of the dragon will create one door and destroy another. Caelum’s voice will sing it closed with ice and fire and blood, and be lost until she claims her new tongue and the dragon’s