Darkest Knight - Karen Duvall

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Fury in his eyes, Shojin lowered me to the ground. His grip on my neck lessened, but I felt something warm trickle down the collar of my shirt. I vaguely wondered how badly I’d been wounded, and if it even mattered. For the second time in less than two months I was about to become gargoyle chow.

       If I hadn’t been so weak from lack of oxygen I’d be slicing through his thick chest right now and cutting out his beating heart. As it was, my legs couldn’t even hold me up. I hung from Shojin’s claws like a bloody rag doll.

       The gargoyle growled and squawked as if trying to talk. He shook his head and clacked his beak. What would he say if he could speak? Thanks for the quick snack, and I’ll have your guardian angel for dessert?

       He pried the balisong from my hand, his clumsy claw gouging my arm in the process. Who knew a gargoyle preferred to cut his meat with a knife? But instead of peeling me open like a ripe piece of fruit, he plunged the blade into his own chest.

       Shojin’s grip on me weakened as he sawed through his flesh in search of what lay beating underneath.

       I knew in that moment that he loved Aydin as much as I did. His adoration for a mere human stunned me. I wasn’t sure I could grasp the concept of compassion coming from a fiend.

       His eyes glazed and filled with tears. I could imagine pain had caused this reaction, but I had to give him more credit than that. Aydin had told me many times that Shojin was different. That his beast wasn’t a homicidal killer like others of its kind. I realized now that he’d been right.

       A tear dripped from the corner of Shojin’s eye and slid over the coarse surface of his beak. I bit my lip to stop my own tears from flowing. I wouldn’t dishonor him by showing pity. He’d done an honorable thing for a friend and it was costing him his life.

       He dropped the knife, which quickly dissolved to dust after having done its job, then closed his eyes while reaching inside the hole he’d cut into his chest. When he opened his clawed hand, a glowing lump of purple flesh lay centered in his palm. He offered me the still-beating heart.

       We both fell to our knees and I caught the heart before it could hit the ground. It was warm and wet and mine.

       Shojin gasped and collapsed forward, his dense body falling hard and shattering in more pieces than I could count. When a gargoyle died, it always turned to stone. So his lifeless body breaking apart was no surprise. What surprised me was that his heart continued its rapid bass drum beat. A minute later the organ went still in my hands.

       The heart was still warm, still glowing, but solid and shiny as a purple gemstone. Now I understood why Shojin had fought me so hard. If I’d killed him like I wanted, his heart would have shattered along with the rest of his body when he died. He’d known I would come and had planned all along to end his life this way.

       Shojin had proved himself more angel than demon; he was a creature with a soul. His sacrifice would mean new life for Aydin.

      two

      AS MUCH AS I WANTED TO MOURN SHOJIN’S passing, I had to get the hell out of the house before a flood of Vyantara magic-users descended on me.

       I gulped a shaky breath and glanced at the pink scar on the palm of my hand. My sigil was new, only a couple of weeks old, but that made the young scar no less effective. Eyes still stinging with the tears I held back, I smeared blood from my neck onto the scar and flattened my hand against the wall, waiting for the fluttery buzz that came with opening a veil. The tension in my shoulders increased with each passing second. The veil usually opened immediately. What was taking so long?

       I clenched my jaw and listened. No thundering footsteps on the floor above, no wards sending out rays of lightning or demon warriors to take me out. No veil opening for my sigil, either. I began to wonder if I was in a time warp. I’d seen something like that done once. In fact, it was my fallen angel father who had made it happen.

       I tried my sigil again. Nothing. What the hell?

       I looked at the stone heart I still held and rolled my eyes. Of course the veil wouldn’t open. Gargoyles, and anything associated with a gargoyle that wasn’t angel-blessed, was not allowed through the silver veil. As long as I had the heart I was stuck here.

       But that didn’t explain why the Vyantara hadn’t come running at the sound of battle. I went back to the basement stairs and stepped cautiously up to the top. That’s when I saw the halt charm. About six inches tall, it was the figure of a hand woven with strips of bark from an ancient oak tree. I recognized it because I’d stolen the charm from a museum in Wales about five years ago for the Vyantara. It was one of many magical artifacts I’d been forced to steal as their indentured thief. The charm’s fingers were spread out in a stop gesture and its palm faced the door. Someone had placed it there to soundproof the basement.

       Charms don’t work on me, which is why I could hear Shojin’s beating heart when I was on the other side of the door. I suspected Shojin himself had placed the charm here, and not to keep me from finding him, but to keep others away once I did. And it had worked.

       But that didn’t solve my current problem. The only way I knew out of the house was through the house itself.

       I wasn’t doing myself any favors by standing still, so I freed the spare butterfly knife from my ankle sheath and opened the basement door. Greeted by silence, I took it as a good sign and continued making my way through the kitchen. Getting to the basement in the first place had been no problem, so chances were good I’d get out of the house just as easily. A lot could be said for positive thinking.

       I crept through the main part of the house where glass-lidded tables displayed dusty old relics tagged by yellowing strips of paper. Each one had a typed word and number that referenced it for the Vyantara’s catalog. They made their money by selling off these cursed and charmed antiques to the highest bidder. There were hundreds of them in this room alone.

       I stopped and listened to the silence, hearing only the low thrum of slow heartbeats and the smooth breathing of those in sleep. No one would miss an object or two…or three. Along with the bottle of salt water I used for destroying spells, I always carried a special pouch that hid magical objects from detection. I’d simply toss a handful of these in the pouch and be on my way.

       A pocket watch inscribed with a protection spell would be useful for my sister knights in the Order of the Hatchet. Our knighthood shared a bond of nearly a thousand years, starting when our ancestors fought side by side in the Crusade Wars. Each generation gave birth to daughters spawned by their guardian angels. My sisters still fought together, and though the war had changed, the goal of vanquishing evil remained the same. I was proud to be one of them.

       I dropped the watch in my pouch along with a fountain pen filled with invisible ink that made the writer disappear instead of the words. Then I found something I wouldn’t mind having for myself if I weren’t immune: a dove’s feather that enabled the user to fly.

       Treasures in hand, I headed for the front door, which appeared farther away than it had only minutes ago. In fact, the faster I walked the more distance I created between the door and me. Déjà vu.

       The same thing had happened to me on my first night at the Denver fatherhouse. I suspected a similar ward had been triggered here and the apparition of my demon foe would appear any second. A fuzzy image took shape in the foyer and a zigzag of energy wiggled through it like a weak signal on a television screen. Blackish-purple and bald, green eyes glowing, the Maågan demon offered me a menacing grin as if it knew me. Perhaps it did. I had severed the arm from one of its cousins a few weeks ago when it tried to stop my escape from a building that was about to explode.

       I was fresh out of gargoyle blades and I doubted the knife I had would even make a dent in that thing. Its hide was strong as iron. At the moment it was only a projection from the hellish realm of the black veil, like the warning growl of an attack dog. If provoked, the creature would pop through to this side and kill me on the spot.

       The last time I’d tried running from one, its claws had sliced my ankle and the venom had made me sick.

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