A pawn? A goddamned pawn? So much for the arousal. She’d concede that she needed him, and that without him, she was lost in this world. But, according to him, she was, right now, the most important human on the planet.

“I’ll listen to you, but you need to treat me with a little respect. Because it doesn’t sound like I’m a pawn. Sounds like I’m more of a queen.” A vein in his temple began to throb, and she grew bolder, the sense of power emanating from the mark on her chest filling her with the mettle she’d lost after the break-in two years ago. Lowering her voice to a tense whisper, she nipped his earlobe. “Checkmate.”

Ten

For the second time in two days, third time in six months, Arik was back at The Aegis’s Berlin headquarters, which normally wouldn’t be a problem—Arik loved German food, beer, and women. But he hadn’t had time to indulge in any of those things, and he was starting to get cranky.

Worse, in order to get in on Aegis inner workings, he’d had to swear in as an official Guardian. The organization was a little too radical, secretive, and unorganized for him—he preferred the stricter, more structured management of the military. But once it became clear that The Aegis wasn’t going to budge on this, he’d handed over the only piece of jewelry he wore—his Army ring—so The Aegis could engrave it with their shield symbol and imbue it with protective magic.

He wiggled the fingers on his left hand, feeling the heft of the ring on his middle finger. Somehow it felt heavier than it had before, as if the Aegis spells that enhanced his night vision and gave him a number of other handy abilities, had added weight.

Regan greeted Arik in the antechamber, which was decked out to resemble an accounting office. Anyone who came in to deliver mail, food, or whatever thought the building belonged to a firm that kept personnel records for large corporations. The Guardian riding desk duty was from a local Aegis cell, trained to act like a secretary. She pressed a button, and one wall slid back, revealing a seemingly endless hallway lit by flickering fluorescent tubes.

Regan led Arik down the hall, past the main offices, the conference room, the labs, the stairs that led to the containment cells… aka dungeon. The Aegis didn’t experiment on demons the way the R-XR did, but they did extract information from them. No doubt The Aegis was as good at intel-gathering as the R-XR was.

Finally, they arrived at a secured door that required Regan to enter a password into the keypad on the wall.

What the hell did they have in there? Arik was used to extreme security measures in the R-XR, but The Aegis seemed to rely more on magic and their own inflated sense of invincibility, so passwords inside an already secure area seemed odd.

“Kynan’s inside,” Regan said. “Don’t touch anything.”

“First time I’ve heard that from a woman,” he drawled, mainly to annoy her. But it was also true.

“Asshole,” she muttered, as she spun on her chunky-heeled boots and sauntered away, her long ponytail bouncing against the back of her neck.

Smiling to himself, he entered the room… which was more of a warehouse than anything. Rows of numbered shelves laden with boxes, bags, and tagged items stretched for what seemed like miles. Along the ceiling, cameras mounted at regular intervals formed a grid that no doubt covered every inch of the room, which was temperature- and humidity-controlled. To his right was a washing station and surgical gloves.

“Arik!”

Kynan raised his hand from where he sat in a recessed area that resembled a library study. Dozens of books and scrolls formed a mountain on the table where Kynan was working with a laptop computer.

“What do you guys keep in here?” Arik asked, as he pulled up a chair across from Ky.

“Ancient and religious artifacts, magical items, demonic objects… you name it.” Ky cocked his thumb at another space that was crammed with bookshelves. “That’s our entire history. Everything ever written about The Aegis, no matter how small the account, is there. What we know of, anyway.” He sat back in his leather chair. “Heard anything from the R-XR?”

“An Australian plague is affecting sheep with a hundred percent mortality rate, and it’s spreading faster than one of their wildfires. Twenty percent of the native population of Madagascar has been wiped out by some demon strain of bubonic plague. And in the Marshall Islands, everyone on Lib Island has been blinded by what the WHO suspects is a parasitic infection. The military has been deployed to four continents to suppress growing violence over the flu pandemic and to assist the UN in quarantining as many affected areas as possible. Problem is that there are too many, and dozens more pop up every day.” Arik blew out a long, tired breath. “What about The Aegis? What’s new with you guys?”

“Some Guardians have disappeared. We lose them every once in a while… they get killed by demons and dragged away, but we’ve suddenly lost two dozen within a matter of weeks, snatched right out of their homes. And tension is firing up between the born and turned wargs again. The truce I negotiated after the battle in Canada finally fell apart.”

Arik studied his friend, noted the dark crescents framing his eyes. “You look like hell.”

“That’s because all I’ve been doing is research. Gem hasn’t been feeling well lately, and I have to f**king be stuck in Aegis headquarters going over crap that makes no sense.”

“What’s wrong? Is it the baby?” Gem was about eight and a half months pregnant, and Kynan was so devoted to her that being away couldn’t be easy even if, thanks to Kynan’s ability to use Harrowgates, something normal humans couldn’t do, he was only minutes away from her no matter where he was in the world.

“Gem’s exhausted. The unrest in the underworld is creating a lot of patients for Underworld General, and she’s working overtime. The baby’s fine.” He grinned, and the dark circles vanished. “We can’t wait.”

“Do you know if it’s a boy or girl?”

“Nope. Like Luc and Kar, we wanted it to be a surprise.”

Luc, a warg paramedic at UGH, and his mate, Kar, had delivered their baby girl just last week. “I’m guessing you’re not doing up the nursery in neutral pastels?” Gem was a Goth chick, half-Soulshredder, a species of demon that made other demons piss themselves, and as far as Arik could tell, there was nothing soft about her.

“Hell, no. Gem’s all about the primary colors. The baby’s room looks like someone regurgitated a box of crayons.”

Arik laughed, and then sobered. “Okay, so I don’t think you called me here to talk about babies.”

Ky’s expression got four-star-general serious. “No.” He pushed the laptop at Arik. “Can you speak Silan?”

“As in, the language of Silas demons?”

“Yes. We intercepted some chatter, but we can’t understand it, and we can’t find anyone who speaks this particular dialect. Not even my in-laws.”

“Why do you think talk between a bunch of demon mercs is important?”

“Because they were recruited by one of Pestilence’s men, a former Aegi we’ve been watching since we kicked him out a few months ago.” Kynan’s gaze met Arik’s. “This has to stay between you, me, and Regan. Not even the other Elders know.”

“Why?”

“Because the former Aegi traitor is Valeriu’s son, David.”

Arik whistled, loud and long. “Val? An Elder’s own son is teaming up with demons?” Arik supposed he shouldn’t be surprised—David had betrayed The Aegis before. But working with Pestilence to bring about the Apocalypse… that went beyond betrayal.

“Yeah. Nice, huh?” Kynan rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “We don’t want to take him into custody yet. Right now, he’s doing more good for us than he knows. Val’s been trying to mend the relationship with him, and if he knows what David has been doing…” Kynan shook his head. “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Why is he free in the first place? I thought he was a prisoner.”

“Val convinced us to release him into his custody.”

“Well, shit.” Arik attempted to calculate the kind of damage David could do, but the mental math left him exhausted. “So what’s up with the computer?”

“Hit Shift-P.”

Arik did, and voices drifted out of the speaker. It was all gibberish at first, but Arik had an uncanny ability to listen to any demon language, and after only a few words, learn it. Cool, sure, but it had come via a disease he’d contracted from a demon, and sometimes he wondered if any other, less useful abilities were going to rear up.

The R-XR ran a monthly battery of tests on him, and so far there had been no alterations in his DNA, no changes in his appearance, no demonic signs of any kind at all.

“There are three of them. They’re talking about eating… ah, man, demons are nasty.” Arik leaned in, listening carefully. “Okay, so… they’re supposed to be on the lookout for a human woman. Pestilence wants her dead. They think she’s probably with War. Now they’re going off about something… some great lord wants his bride.” Arik separated the blah from the blah, wondered if there was a soda machine close by…“Oh, got it. Looks like Satan wants to settle down and have some unholy little spawns. How sweet. Lucky woman, whoever she is.”

The recording got scratchy and ended.

Kynan braced his elbows on the table, his expression contemplative. “I couldn’t care less about Satan’s love life, but the human? We have to find out who she is and why Pestilence wants her dead. Anyone he wants dead could be our new best friend.”

“This is needle-in-haystack shit. And the haystack is made of needles. On a needle planet.”

“Which is why we need to find a way to neutralize the Horsemen, and I think I’ve found it.” Ky opened one of the tattered tomes to a page he’d bookmarked. “Seems that in 1108, a group of Aegi were battling a hellhound, and losing. Two of the Horsemen—doesn’t specify which—dropped by to help. Apparently, one of them yelled to the other, something about avoiding a bite. The surviving Guardian noted it because he found it odd that a Horseman would fear anything.”

Arik leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs at the ankles. “So you’re saying these big bad immortal Horsemen are crybabies when it comes to dog bites?”

“That’s the thing… it’s not the bite itself.” Kynan tapped the page. “See, two hundred years later, a Guardian searching for a weapon against the Horsemen found the account of the battle and theorized about the potency of hellhound saliva. Then, in 1317, the Great Famine was at its worst, people in Europe were starving, eating their work animals, abandoning their children, engaging in cannibalism. Everyone thought the end of the world was upon them, and the third Horseman of the Apocalypse, Famine, was blamed.”

“Naturally.” Didn’t matter if it was hundreds of years ago or just last week, humans were always blaming someone, whether it was a Horseman, the devil, or God, for natural and man-made disasters.

“The Aegis performed a ceremony to call Famine,” Kynan continued. “When she arrived, they nailed her with an arrow coated in hellhound saliva, and it totally incapacitated her.”

Arik developed a severe case of the uh-ohs. “What did they do with her?”

Kynan winced. “Let’s just say that things were bad between The Aegis and them already, and after that? It’s a wonder the Horsemen haven’t wiped out every one of us.” Ky’s voice grew troubled. “One of the passages also indicates that they took something from her, but it’s not clear what.”

“Okay, so hellhound spit is our magic weapon against them? Don’t suppose The Aegis has a kennel full of them.”

Kynan cocked a dark eyebrow. “Hardly. But about thirty seconds before you got here, an Aegis cell in York, England, procured one.”

Arik sucked in a sharp breath. “No shit? How?”

“People in a suburban neighborhood complained of howling, and police entered, found a strange black dog in a cage in the basement. The containment symbols on the cage and floor freaked them out, and when they made calls about it, The Aegis got wind, and we went in and got the hellhound pup.”

“You said it’s a puppy?”

“Yeah. Stroke of luck. I don’t know how we’d have pulled off the transport of a full-grown one.”

Abruptly, a sparkly flash of light appeared behind Kynan. Arik instinctively leaped to his feet and reached for his sidearm, but when Kynan merely sighed, Arik relaxed.

A little.

“Reaver, do you not know how to knock?”

“Angels don’t knock.”

“Do angels explain why they haven’t been available for six months?” Kynan asked. “I’ve been trying to summon you.”

Reaver shrugged. “Shit happens.” He cast a glance at Arik. “Heard you signed on with The Aegis. Good move—they can use you.”

Arik didn’t bother to ask how the angel knew he’d joined. Even if he’d wanted to ask, he couldn’t. He was standing in a room with a freaking angel and utterly speechless.

“Have the Horsemen agreed to meet with us?” Kynan asked, and Reaver nodded.

“They’ll see up to three Aegi, but I only want you two.”

Arik finally found his voice. “Why me? There are more senior members of The Aegis, and I’m not really a Guardian.”

“You’re sworn in,” Reaver replied. “And you’re a member of the R-XR. The military needs to be kept up on everything. And the fact that your sister is a werewolf and your in-laws are demons might help convince them that you’re not a fanatical Aegi who is out to kill them.”