Demon Forged

Guardians returned to Caelum for moments of quiet and to complete the busy work of their assignments. Alejandro preferred the warmth of his house. It wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t silent , either—whereas Caelum’s silence was so enormous that Alejandro had difficulty focusing on anything else. He’d have found himself thinking of all those Guardians lost during the Ascension, instead of what he should have been contemplating: a demon’s incompetence with a sword.
    Palacio’s and Verón’s skills weren’t near the level that qualified a Guardian to teach others. Either the demons weren’t invested in properly training the vampires, or there were so few skilled warriors among Belial’s demons that they made do with what they had.
    The second possibility intrigued him—but Alejandro knew the first was far more likely. The demons wanted a supply of vampire blood, and their offer to train the vampires—to prepare them to fight the nephilim—appeared to be a fair trade. The vampires wouldn’t know until it was too late that the protection the demons provided was substandard.
    And an illusion. A vampire couldn’t beat a nephil in hand-to-hand combat. Their only real protection started with a phone call to Special Investigations and the Guardians.
    Tomorrow, Alejandro would use the demons’ blood to open that line of communication.
    He put his pen back to paper to continue the report. One day, he knew, he would succumb to modern computers. But he enjoyed the scratch of the pen’s steel nib against the paper, the coppery scent of the ink—and he could write his reports in triplicate at the same speed a computer saved a file to its hard drive. He glanced over at the waist-high stack of newspapers and journals delivered to his home every week. And he had yet to see a computer that had a data connection fast enough to deliver him the same amount of news in the five minutes he would need to read through that stack—and deliver it in as many languages. Yes, he was quite satisfied with ink and paper.
    A community gathering is scheduled for tomorrow night.
    I will—
    Thunder cracked above the house, rattling the windows. Alejandro called in his swords and leapt atop his desk, listening. Not thunder. The skies were cloudless.
    A shout shattered the silence. An ear-splitting crash followed. Alejandro raced through his house toward the solarium. The glass roof had collapsed. The scent of blood, burnt flesh, and ozone filled the room. In the corner, Jake bent over a still form.
    Irena.
    Alejandro pushed in front of Jake. Electrical burns scorched her forearm and hand, shallow slices and deep gashes bloodied her face and side. Her leather apron had protected her stomach and breasts—not so her arms. “Find a healer, Jake. Now.”
    “No.” Irena clenched her teeth as she propped herself on her unburned elbow. “I will heal.”
    Jake crouched and picked a jagged shard out of her blistered forearm, wincing at its size. “I’m sorry, Irena. So sorry.” He glanced over at Alejandro. “We meant to jump in a few hundred yards up in case Emilia was here. I wouldn’t just pop in on you again—”
    “You can. She no longer lives here.” He watched Irena’s expression, but it didn’t change, and she didn’t look up at him. With the edge of her thumbnail, she pried up a spur of glass embedded in her biceps.
    Jake nodded. “Okay. Good to know. So we jumped in, but my new Gift just— Zzzzt! Got us. Okay, actually, it got her .”
    Irena vanished the spur, started pulling out another. “You need to learn control, or it will be Alice next.”
    “Gee, Irena, thanks. I hadn’t figured that out yet.”
    Her head snapped back. Her glare eviscerated the young Guardian.
    Apology rushed through Jake’s psychic scent. “Sorry. I know.” His throat worked. “It’s just that the thought of accidentally doing this to her freaks me out.”
    Irena’s mouth softened, and she sighed. Alejandro fought the urge to flay Jake for his thoughtlessness—and ignored the tug of envy in his chest. Irena never let go of her anger so easily with him.
    “Try this, Jake.” A steel pole appeared in Irena’s hand. She looked the metal staff up and down, then glanced at Jake. Her Gift pulsed; a foot-long blade formed at each end. “Use it as an electrical ground every time you teleport, so that the spark will go through it instead of us.”
    Jake took the weapon, his mouth twisting ruefully. “It’s not just a spark