Demon Marked

into the hall near the gymnasium, most of them avoided it—which was probably why Rosalia hadn’t used it, either. The Gate had been created after a Guardian had sacrificed herself to save one of the novices a year ago; her death was too fresh for most of the Guardians here, and using the Gate seemed to trample on her memory.
    Fortunately, Michael still allowed Taylor to teleport to Special Investigations—and if not for Michael, she’d have likely been living at the warehouse full-time, along with the other novices. Taylor could fight, she could shoot, but her skills were nothing against the abilities and speed of a demon . . . until Michael took over.
    As frustrating as that was, Taylor had to be grateful for it, too. She’d have gone mad, cooped up in the warehouse instead of working in the field. Most Guardians had trained for a hundred years before they’d been allowed to fight a demon. Now, because they were so strapped for manpower, a Guardian might start working after only four or five decades of training, but that was still too long to wait.
    So Taylor trained herself in the basic Guardian stuff like flying, shape-shifting, and weapons—she didn’t always want to rely on Michael—but she worked, too. Her job tracking down demons wasn’t much different than the one she’d had as an inspector in the San Francisco Police Department. She just lied a lot more, had a worldwide jurisdiction, covered up evidence instead of unearthing it, and when she located a demon, she tossed away anything resembling a fair trial and went straight to capital punishment.
    All of that had gone against the grain when she’d begun, but the more demons she met, the more she saw the necessity of it. Demons didn’t play by manmade rules; they played with them. So Guardians did the same. The difference was, Guardians tried not to hurt anyone while they did it.
    Which, when it came down to it, was really the same as the spirit of human laws: Try not to fuck other people over or hurt anyone. If you do, you pay for it.
    Simple, really.
    Taylor mentally swept the building as soon as she teleported into the large hub at the heart of the warehouse—a habit she’d picked up from Michael, but now, apparently, she did on her own. Since the sun was up, no vampires were working, though she sensed a few sleeping upstairs. Most of the Guardians’ minds were shielded, but a few sent a little mental probe in return; since they couldn’t actually send thoughts, only project emotions and images, that psychic touch was the equivalent of a Hello .
    A little disappointed that she couldn’t sense Joe Preston, her former partner on the force and now a human working for SI in almost the same capacity that she did, Taylor headed for the director’s offices, instead. She missed Joe, though she understood why they weren’t paired up on assignments; Michael or not, it would be like putting two novices together. Maybe when she had a few more years under her belt . . .
    Of course, in a few more years, Joe would hit retiring age. God, that was crazy to think about. Something that she didn’t want to think about. Taylor knew she was lucky—a hundred years of training meant that most Guardian novices never saw their family and friends again—but she didn’t know how well she’d take immortality when she saw her mother, her partner, and her brother aging themselves to death.
    Maybe Michael could help her deal with that, too. He’d seen hundreds of human generations grow old and die.
    Aaaaaand, no. That thought didn’t help at all.
    Shaking away the morbidity of it, Taylor rapped on the director’s office door.
    Her hope that a male voice would answer was dashed when Lilith called for her to enter. Crap. Taylor got along a little better with Hugh Castleford, a former Guardian who now shared the office with Lilith and served as a codirector when he wasn’t training the novices. This obviously wasn’t one of those times.
    Lilith sat behind her big desk, and didn’t glance up from her computer when Taylor came in. She must have had an outside meeting today. Instead of the leather pants and corset that Lilith usually wore, she appeared as she had the first time Taylor had met her: in a severely cut pantsuit, with her long black hair in a tight roll at her nape, and the bulge of her weapon just visible beneath her jacket.
    Lilith had been an FBI agent then, and she’d deliberately fucked one of Taylor and Joe’s murder investigations into a