ONE
I was dozing.
“Jackson,” Cielo Jones, my partner, scolded me in a whisper at the same time something bounced off my chest.
Opening my eyes to slits, checking the floor at my feet, I saw the yellow highlighter. He was trying really hard to look all serious and professional, but there were doodles all over his notepad. Clearly, he was just as bored as I was.
Glancing at the speaker on my desk, making sure the red button was on so I knew it was muted, I picked up the yellow highlighter in my lap and tossed it back at him. I didn’t fling it because I was a warder and far stronger than an average man. I was powerful enough to fight demons and all other creatures from the pit. I didn’t want to accidentally put the highlighter through one of my best friends in the entire world.
“You could have killed me with that,” he grumbled, knowing I could, one of the few people who knew my secret, but also that I would never hurt him. He was the first person I’d ever trusted outside of the clutch of warders that were my family.
“Yes,” I agreed. “But that’s why I lobbed it at you and didn’t hurl it like a shuriken,” I replied snidely.
“Are you still with me, gentlemen?” the CEO of Orion Security asked us.
Cielo quickly unmuted the speaker. “Yes, sir, we’re very interested in hearing more about your offer, and again, we appreciate your interest in acquiring our company.”
Cielo and I ran a small security company in San Francisco. We were a full-service provider and did everything from sending bodyguards out to physically watch over people, to Cielo, a white-hat hacker, one of the few on the NSA’s “good list,” making sure that nothing and no one on the internet could hurt them. That, of course, was relative. Gossip and cyberbullying could still be painful, but we could track it back to your door, which made us better than average. What made us really scary was that, given my paranormal proclivities, I could show up in the bad guy’s living room in Budapest out of thin air. Well, out of a swirling vortex of ice and wind that was the warders’ wormhole equivalent, but it was still impressive. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to use my warder powers to fight anything but demonic evil, but stalking or scaring someone, simply because you could, fell into my evil column.
We also helped clients disappear into the ether if whoever was destroying their lives was far too toxic for regular law enforcement to take care of. We took sons and daughters to rehab, watched over children, and supplied muscle physically, emotionally, and mentally. We even saved a hundred cats once, some that had been stolen from backyards and front porches, from being delivered to a pharmaceutical company that wanted them for research. Our client’s daughter was being chased in a truck loaded with the retrieved cats and kittens, and she had several black SUVs trailing her onto the freeway. Terrified more for the cats than for herself, she made a frantic call to her father, who, just as terrified, called us. He didn’t want her to go to jail, but he couldn’t ask her to surrender the animals either. They ran a rescue; it simply wasn’t possible.
Directing her to one of our many facilities, this one in Burlingame, she drove directly into our garage, and we closed the door behind her. A security detail from the research facility—all in black and packing some serious firepower—came to the door, but the issue was, there was no way to breach our building. When one of our people went out and asked them for a warrant—pretending not to know they weren’t the police—he then pointed out that if they wanted to come in, they had to get one. The thing was, yes, they probably had a whole fleet of lawyers at their disposal and could have taken our client, and us, to court, but that would take time. Since there was no crime that law enforcement had been called about, even if anyone did return, by that time there would be no truck to find and certainly no kittens. We didn’t have a vehicle elevator and an underground tunnel for nothing. It was going to be a clusterfuck if they ended up reporting it, so they left having failed, and didn’t come back.
Our company was a good one, though we skirted the law on many occasions. No one had a better reputation than us, and when Orion lost three consecutive bids to us, which we’d won not on price, but on commitment and quality, it was not a surprise when they came knocking. As we were growing beyond our means—our people needed to be able to work on many fronts at once, which required more space than we currently had—Cielo had thought to take a meeting based not on selling our business, but on a partnership agreement. We would retain our autonomy and acquire their infrastructure. And it turned out that was smart because if I was hearing what I thought I was—and again, I was, in fact, fading in and out—then they wanted us to stay.
My phone pinged with a message, and when I checked, it was from my friend and fellow warder, Ryan Dean. All it said was: Meeting now with Jael.
Reaching out to mute the speaker, I looked at Cielo. “I have to see my sentinel,” I said, instead of the man’s name so my friend would know it was vital.
He nodded. “I’ll take care of it. Just, if you have to go somewhere, leave from here.” He gestured around, letting me know he meant not the room or our offices, but San Francisco. “And I need you to let me know. You can’t disappear. You promised.”
“Of course,” I replied softly, soothing him. “But it’s not like that. I’m sure it’s not like that.”
“We’ll see,” was all he said.
An hour later, I was watching Leith Haas pace. Since out of all of us, he was the logical one, the unflappable one, the one who never, ever showed his emotions to anyone but his hearth, it scared me. I kept one eye on him and one on my sentinel, Jael Ezran.
“Tell me again,” Marcus said slowly, looking at Malic Sunden, another of the four warders in my clutch of five.
We were in Jael’s house on this chilly February afternoon, all of us trying to make sense of the strangeness. And normally it would not have been a problem, which in and of itself was impressive, considering what we did. We were all used to frightening life-and-death supernatural occurrences that would send most people to a room lined in rubber. But we were warders who protected our city, five of us and our leader, our sentinel, who watched over us like a father and big brother and teacher all rolled into one. We were built to handle external nightmares we needed to protect innocent people from. This, however, was not that. This was insidious, a cancer that had been growing inside, right under our noses, that we’d all missed until now.
“Malic?”
Malic looked pained, and I saw it clearly in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders and the furrow of his brows.
“It’s not your fault,” Dylan told him again, having said it, I was certain, a million times in the last few days. His head was leaning against one of Malic’s massive shoulders, and he was holding his hand tightly. I saw the engagement ring on Dylan’s finger, the chunk of diamond Malic had given him almost two months ago, and I thought, as I had the first time I saw it, that no one could ever miss that Dylan Shaw was taken. It was gaudy and expensive and a gesture I would have never thought my fellow warder capable of. But it turned out that Malic Sunden was a big marshmallow for his hearth, the man he loved. As always, looking at them, I was struck by the contrast of the two. Malic was a mountain of hard, chiseled muscle, while Dylan was as delicate and fragile as a bird. They could not be more different, yet no one could miss the love, right there, living, breathing, between them. They were supposed to be married in April, but given what was happening now, I was guessing the big day was going to have to wait.