Demon Marked

After Khavi . . .” Taylor shook her head. “It could be argued that she left you alone to die. Or that she single-handedly arranged events so that every decision you, Ash, Lilith, and I made led to your becoming a Guardian. We don’t even know if the stuff about Ash being able to get Michael out of the field was true, or if that was just designed to put everything in motion. And I don’t know what we’re going to do when she comes waltzing back in, but you’re one of us now, and your input will have weight.”
    He didn’t care about that. Group decision making wasn’t his style. They could what they liked. He’d do as he liked . . . when he could.
    “Why am I not healing right?”
    “We’ve got theories. You want to hear them?”
    “Yes.”
    “One is that I fucked up the transformation.”
    “Did you?” If so, he could live with it. Some of it had obviously worked. He had strength. He could hear her heart beating. He could see a tiny fleck of quartz in a toppled marble column lying one hundred yards away. If he healed a little more slowly than most Guardians, then he’d just train hard enough, get so damn good with his weapons that he’d be hurt less, too. Hell, he’d do that even if he healed normally from this point forward.
    Either way, problem solved.
    “I think it went okay. Things only went bad when I tried to heal you. That’s when Michael came in, and that didn’t exactly go so well. So, that’s the second theory—that the trauma of his mind slipping into yours was a shock to your whole system, and on top of the transformation . . .” She sighed. “Most Guardians are up and aware the second they are transformed. Me, I was in a coma for three months after he first got into my brain. You were only unconscious for about six hours, which might have just been the time your brain needed to heal, anyway. So you came through better than I did.”
    “Or maybe I came through better because you shielded my mind from his.”
    “I—” She looked at him in surprise. “That is kind of you, St. Croix.”
    “I’m healing and vulnerable. It probably won’t happen often.”
    Taylor laughed, and Nicholas bore the pang against his heart, the longing for the laugh he most wanted to hear. God, he missed Ash.
    “Any third theories?” Anything to get him back to Earth more quickly.
    “Two more, and both of them a bit more mental than physical.” When he frowned at her, she said, “It matters, you know—the way a person perceives himself. Like, I’ve heard there were some novices who literally fell apart when they tried to shape-shift, because they couldn’t hold an image of themselves in their mind. Then there’s someone like Drifter, who can barely hold any shape other than his own, because his image of himself is so fixed. The funny thing about Drifter, though, is that last year, he had his leg bitten off by a dragon. Gulp! and everything from the thigh down was gone. That should have taken him a month to regenerate. He was walking around in two weeks.”
    Nicholas had to laugh. “So you think I’m not sure of myself? That I don’t know myself? I should introduce you to my therapist.” A thought occurred to him. “Where, by the way, you might find Khavi.”
    “But she’d know we were coming and skip her appointment that day.”
    “That’s . . .” Nicholas trailed off, frowning. He didn’t know what to call it. Difficult didn’t seem to cover it.
    Taylor nodded, as if reading his expression. “Now try a year of that.”
    “I will be, apparently.”
    “Yeah.” Taylor abruptly sobered, and looked out over the city. “Which brings me to the fourth and final theory: You don’t give a shit about being a Guardian.”
    “I don’t give a shit about a lot of things.”
    “I know. You don’t let anything get in your way when you want something. Death almost put a big fucking obstacle in there, but it just so happened that the one thing in the world you care about needed saving, and so you got another chance. You lucked out.”
    Nicholas had nothing to say. He couldn’t argue that.
    “I know you have Ash. That’s a pretty damn good reason to want to come back, to want to live. But it has nothing to do with being a Guardian. And I know what it’s like not to want the transformation, but taking it anyway, because someone’s counting on you, or you just don’t want to die. Those are all good reasons for saying yes to the transformation. But to keep going? It’s not enough.