Maureen Child - Nevermore

Impossible, but again he seemed to be staring right at her.

“ You? ” This time, he spoke English. Rising slowly, he kept his knife at his side in a tight fist and took a step toward her. “Who the hell are you? Where did you come from?”

“This can’t be happening,” Erin whispered.

Instantly, she dropped the bone-handled knife, effectively ending the vision, and a heartbeat later she found herself back in the antique store in Maine. She was stretched out on the cold tile floor, staring up at the proprietor, who didn’t look any too happy with her.

“Are you having a fit or something?” she demanded.

Erin blew out a breath and tried to get her bearings. Coming out of a vision was always a little tiring and this time, she felt as though she’d been running a marathon.

“Huh? What? A fit?”

“What’ve you got? Amnesia?”

“No,” Erin said and eased up on one elbow. “Why am I on the floor?”

“Because you tipped over in a dead faint,” the woman said and the two elderly customers Erin had seen before each nodded in agreement.

“That’s very true, dear,” one of the ladies said with a brisk nod, “you did. Frightened me and my sister half to death.”

“So,” the proprietor said loudly, “if you think you’re going to sue me for this, you can think again,” the woman warned. “I’ve got surveillance cameras, young lady. And witnesses. You didn’t trip over anything. You just toppled clean over.”

Oh, for Heaven’s sake.

“I’m not going to sue,” Erin assured her and sat up slowly, since her stomach was a little on the icky side at the moment. Astral traveling always upset her stomach.

“It’s closing time,” the old woman, clearly not a people person said, “so I think you’d better go.”

“Yeah.” Erin picked the knife off the floor beside her warily, half expecting the visions to come again. But for the moment at least, the knife was quiet, as if it had shown her all it could and now she was on her own.

Well, that was fine. She at least had an idea of what to do now. Where to go.

Standing, she said, “I’d like to buy this before I go. How much?”

“I’ll have to check,” the cranky old woman said as her eyes lit up. She led the way to the cash register and Erin knew her VISA card was going to take a serious hit.

But that didn’t matter. She’d found the man who could help her. She knew it instinctively. Just as she knew that though he had died centuries ago, Santos was alive now.

And Erin knew just where to find him.

San Diego, California.

Chapter 2

Santos stalked through the night, keeping his legendary focus directed solely at his target. The demon who had shimmered away from their fight early that morning. Better than trying to understand how that mysterious woman had suddenly appeared before him. Again.

He hadn’t seen her in more than five hundred years. Hadn’t experienced that flash of something molten sliding through his system. One look into her green eyes had thrown Santos off his guard—just as it had the night he’d died so long ago.

Who was she?

What did she want?

And where the hell had she gone?

“No matter,” he said, willing himself to believe it. She was nothing to him. No more than a distraction, perhaps arranged by the very demons he fought.

As an Immortal Guardian, Santos, like his fellow warriors, possessed powers gifted to them by the beings who had first created them. It was the duty of every Guardian to guard the portals leading from the demon dimensions and to capture and return to their personal hell any demon who managed to escape into this reality.

And like Guardians, all demons were different. Each might have powers that others lacked. The demons were motivated to stay free of their dimension in order to kill, to spread dissension, to infiltrate humanity and create chaos.

The Guardians were all that stood between them and the mortal world.

Santos could not afford to be distracted from the job at hand. The small demon had escaped him earlier—after Santos had captured the demon’s master. And though the small one was no great threat to humanity, its presence in this world was unacceptable.

“Little bastard,” Santos muttered, slipping through an alley, barely noticing the stench of garbage spilling from one of the industrial-sized trash cans pushed flush against a brick wall. “What honor is there in running from a fight?”

But even as he thought it, Santos could admit to the irony in that statement. Demons? Honor? The two words had no business being in the same sentence.

And yet, in the more than five hundred years he had been fighting the underworld, he had found that even the most vicious of demons had their own “code.” Not one that he or any of his fellow Guardians would ascribe to, but a code nonetheless.

Centuries of life and a steady stream of battles had taught Santos to never discount an opponent. So he was here, in the back alleys of downtown San Diego, following the trace energy patterns of the demon that had escaped him. He’d never failed to capture his target and he wasn’t going to fail now.

His quiet, careful footsteps were lost in the noise of the city. A rat scuttled out of his way. Traffic hummed on the main streets and tourists laughed and chatted as they meandered along the sidewalks. None of those in the light could even guess at what was happening in the shadows.

But that was as it had always been. Those safe in their own comfortable little lives rarely took the time to glance around them at the darkness. Which ordinarily made his job that much easier.

He stopped suddenly at the mouth of the alley and lifted his gaze to the night sky. The moon was partially covered by clouds, allowing peaks of silver to shine through as brightly as diamonds. The stars were nearly invisible, lost in the harsh glare of the city lights. But did it matter? Humans so rarely looked outside themselves, he doubted many of them ever bothered to glance upward. Shaking his head, Santos stared down the sidewalk and looked past the crowds, searching for the demon’s trail.

He could see nothing from his vantage point though, and moved to enter the crowd. But first Santos waved one hand, creating a wall of energy around himself that would hide him from all eyes. Now he could move through the people of this perpetually damp city without concern. No one here would ever know that an Immortal Guardian had walked among them. Had tracked and captured a demon bent on trouble. No one would have any idea that life was anything but ordinary.

He shook his head and took a deep breath of the sea-scented air. He’d had enough of this place. The damp, cold air seeped into his bones. The never-ending crowd of tourists choked him. The tangle of homes and cars annoyed him. He longed for his home in Barcelona. There, even though he lived atop a cliff overlooking the ocean, the air was cool without the ever-cloying sense of wet. His blood was made for Spain. The heat, the searing sun and the sense of openness that was denied him here.

He averted his gaze from a homeless man staggering along behind his shopping cart and looked instead out at the night. San Diego might be thought of as a nice place to live but to Santos, it was merely another city, with a dark, dangerous underbelly like any other.

The moment he could, Santos would be taking his jet and flying home.

He’d only meant to remain in San Diego briefly. He had come up from Mexico, where he had followed a demon, expecting to go directly to the airport to fly his jet to Spain. Instead, Michael, the being who directed the Guardians, had asked him to stay.

The Guardian who had long protected San Diego, had finally chosen to end his existence. Pain whipped through Santos like a lash and then dissipated again. That Guardian, Stewart Marsh, had been a friend. A stalwart fighter. One who had held the demons at bay for three hundred years. Santos frowned at the loss, then let it go. There was no time. For pain. For remembrance. There was only battle.