Guardian (The Protectors Series) Read online

  “Chopper overhead,” Max Wilson reported.

  “Stay with me,” Stefan said under his breath.

  The mage raiding party had liberated nine humans, two mages, and assorted livestock. Because the use of dark magic left ghouls unable to eat anything other than freshly killed meat or to breed with each other, they kidnapped mages and Mundanes as breeders. And occasionally as snacks, though they usually kept animals for food. Stopping that was damn good work apart from anything the records yielded. Javy didn’t deserve to pay for it with his life.

  “BP forty-six over twenty-three,” Edie said.

  The sounds of battle were moving away. At least Javy wouldn’t die because a fight prevented the chopper that could save him from landing.

  “Edie, you board first and get the defibrillator ready,” Stefan ordered. As she nodded, he looked into Max’s grave, blue eyes and added, “Radio ahead. Order a surgical team to assist me and have an OR prepped for open chest surgery. I want the elevator on the ground floor, doors open. When we land, this litter goes on a gurney, stat.”

  Too bad they couldn’t translocate to the infirmary from the landing pad. Every building on the property was warded against such incursions. Or excursions, for that matter. Even if that weren’t so, the systemic shock of the maneuver would likely kill someone in Javy’s condition.

  Max announced, “Josh is landing.”

  “Forty over—no reading.”

  “Come on, Javy,” Stefan ground out.

  Suddenly, he realized the clash of energies had died. Finally, he heard the chukka, chukka of a descending helicopter. Yes!

  Steeling himself for the worst, preparing to fight it, he watched the chopper descend. Javy’s heart faltered, then stopped.

  Stefan managed not to flinch at the final gurgling wheeze and still silence of Javy’s chest.

  The chopper touched down. Mages in bespelled camo yanked the rear door open. Edie dashed to it while others grabbed the litter and hurried toward the helo. Stefan ran alongside and leaped aboard as they slid his patient into the rear and began tying down the litter for flight.

  Edie cut Javy’s shirt open, spreading it wide. Fingers flying, Stefan placed the adhesive electrodes on his patient’s chest. Even though his magical sense knew the heart had stopped, they had to wait for the machine to realize that.

  * * *

  “Ready,” Edie said.

  Stefan checked the charge. “Clear,” he shouted over the noise of everyone embarking. Electricity plus shrapnel would cause burns, but those were easy to heal. He pressed the button to deliver the shock.

  The jolt of electricity succeeded. Javy’s heart restarted, but he wasn’t breathing properly.

  “Bag him,” Stefan ordered. At least the heartbeat held, though it was far from steady.

  Edie applied the bag mask and pumped air into Javy’s lungs.

  Stefan looked over his shoulder at Tasha. “Tell Josh to go.”

  He barely felt the helo lift off. “Hang in there,” he told his friend.

  The helo was fast, but would it be fast enough? As Edie started an IV, Stefan melded his magic with Javy’s, doing all he could to keep his friend connected to his body. Still, Stefan couldn’t help remembering more was at stake than one mage’s life.

  The Void demons didn’t have a portal to this world. Or so the mages hoped. However, given the ghouls’ recent improvements in strategy, it seemed obvious they were communicating with Void demons. But how could they do that without a portal?

  Maybe the demons have evolved. Mages had. Why shouldn’t their enemies?

  Because stopping them was hard enough without their gaining new powers. They’d never given up easily. Odds were they’d try again to open a portal and bring plague, terror, and death to Earth.

  If that happened, the world was seriously and totally fucked.

  * * *

  Three hours after landing, Stefan stuffed his bloody surgical gown and gloves into the disposal bin. Javy had survived. Now all they could do was wait. At least magic could speed healing, and Stefan’s competent staff would take over that part.

  He glanced at the wall clock. Was it only one thirty in the afternoon? His mind might still be keyed up, but his body felt as though he’d put in a full day’s work.

  He’d called Javy’s wife, Karen, and caught her en route from their north Georgia home. When she arrived, she would want an update, so no use trying to rest. He couldn’t anyway, not after surgery.

  Instead, he wandered up to his office and through the door marked dr. stefan harper, chief physician. The anteroom was empty. His assistant was out, probably at lunch.

  Visitors didn’t see this part of the building. They were restricted to an area rigged to look like a paranormal research lab. The Georgia Institute for Paranormal Research was the cover identity for the mages’ Collegium, the headquarters for the Southeastern U.S. Shire. And wouldn’t there be hell to pay if Mundanes ever learned about that?

  The witch hunts of the seventeenth century, the Burning Times, had graphically demonstrated the lethal folly of letting Mundanes know about mages. Only a small, almost minuscule, few could be trusted with the truth. Open practice of magic was dangerous, and not only to magekind.

  As Stefan had more reason than most to know.

  Even after eighteen years, he still sometimes jolted awake seeing Krista’s pale, dead face. She’d trusted the wrong person, and the situation had blown up in everyone’s faces. Her family and Stefan’s had had to move, and the Northwest Collegium’s memory wipe of the guy she’d unwisely trusted had taken a bit more than intended, despite the mage doctor’s best efforts. Mack, the Mundane bass player in the little band they’d all started together, had lost his music, his math, his hopes for the future. And Krista…hadn’t been able to live with all that.

  As the grief stabbed Stefan’s heart anew, he rubbed his hands over his face. She’d been his best friend, and he’d failed her. If only he’d found her in time.

  He shoved the memory aside and sat at his desk, punching the button for voicemail. Nothing much interesting there, a couple of speaking invitations, an offer to cowrite a paper.

  “Stefan,” the fourth message began in the Wayfarer County sheriff’s familiar, gravelly tone. “It’s Dan Burton. We got an odd murder case here, could use some help. Deceased is missing a lot of blood and has an unknown toxin in what’s left of it.”

  Now, that was intriguing. Stefan focused as the sheriff continued, “Cathy Lamb at GBI recommended you to consult on this, and you work well with my staff. If you’re interested, give me a call. Word’s out about the wounds somehow, so I’ve set up a press conference for late this afternoon. You can get an idea what they’re talking about on the Oracle website.”

  Weird wounds and strange toxins sounded ghoul-related. Stefan turned to the computer and pulled up the Wayfarer weekly newspaper’s site. The murder was splashed across the home page. The victim, Lucinda Baldwin, was an elderly woman, a retired music teacher, but the sheriff’s department was withholding other details.

  Of course they were, or at least they were trying to, but there was a reference to a purple-eyed suspect and a description of deep, curving wounds, as though made from talons.

  Cold prickles rose on Stefan’s neck. Purple eyes, as in Void demon host? Talons, as in ghouls?

  The article said the woman had moved to Wayfarer from Essex, North Carolina. Essex. Lucinda Baldwin. No wonder the name seemed familiar. She’d been Camellia Wray’s music teacher, and Essex was Cami’s hometown.

  Memory slammed into him like a wrecking ball. It shouldn’t have, not after nine years, but he was exhausted, with no reserves to maintain the walls he’d put up around the old wound.

  He could still see Cami’s face, pale in its frame of dark brown hair, her gray eyes wide with hurt as she accused him of cheating on her.

  After they’d dated a couple of months, he’d realized he loved her, so he’d taken the first step of the Revelation Protocols, the steps
mandated for introducing a Mundane to the idea magic was real. She’d reacted badly, so he’d backed off, trying to think of a new angle to try again and falling more in love every day. But then she’d caught him in a lie about what he did on the weekends. Driven by heart-stopping fear that he’d lose her, he’d taken a stupid leap.

  “Marry me,” he’d said in desperation, “and I’ll tell you where I go on those missing weekends.” If she would commit to him, he’d thought, maybe he could trust her with the truth. Maybe she loved him enough not to freak out if he told her he was a mage, that he went away on his off weekends to study magical healing techniques with a mage physician.

  “Tell me,” she’d flung back at him, “and maybe I’ll marry you.”

  Maybe hadn’t been enough for him to risk exposing the mages’ secrets. That would endanger both magekind and Cami. Instead he’d kept his silence and lost her.

  Stefan frowned at the screen. He’d been over her for years, of course, but he still remembered that kick in the gut she’d delivered, first by doubting him and then by leaving him.

  So what if this woman had taught Cami Wray? Cami had nothing to do with this case. Even if she came to the funeral—likely with a husband and kids in tow—he wouldn’t see her because he wouldn’t attend. Thinking of her shouldn’t make his stomach clench. That had to be tension from the hard day he’d had, one that was far from over.

  The picture accompanying the article showed the victim’s bright eyes and kind smile. She’d lived a quiet, ordinary life but died with a weird toxin in her blood, a toxin whose nature Stefan could probably guess without seeing the labs. A toxin he needed to sample, one no Mundane doctor could properly identify.

  If he was right, Dan Burton and his crew would be up against a foe they couldn’t hope to beat. Stefan picked up the phone.

  * * *

  “Thanks for clearing me so quickly, Sheriff Burton.” Considering the suspicion many local cops nursed toward any and all Feds, Mel wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sat on her request. Instead, here she was, midafternoon of the very next day. “I appreciate your bringing me in on this.”

  They stood beside the corner desk he’d assigned to her, the only uncluttered one of eight in the room. With deputies serving as courtroom bailiffs, patrolling the county, and managing the press out front, she and the sheriff had the room to themselves except for the dispatcher and clerk at the front counter.

  “I’m glad to have the help,” Burton said. “I ran that wound pattern through the National Crime Information Center and got a match with a case up near the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. Another one down in the Everglades, although not identical to ours, has similarities.”

  “So we might be hunting a serial killer.” Mel nodded. “I knew the wound pattern seemed familiar. I also logged onto NCIC, with the same result.”

  Frowning, the burly man shook his head. “Damndest thing. Anyway, I asked the Atlanta office to bring you in on this. Brunswick office is our usual contact, but you’re already here.”

  He laid a manila folder on the desk. “Copies of the reports are in here. Bottom line, we found nothin’ new.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “For starters, you can back me up at the press conference. I guess you noticed the crowd out front. Dr. Milledge did the autopsy first thing this morning. I’m thinking somebody at the hospital couldn’t help flapping their lips.”

  Mel and the sheriff exchanged a glance of mutual frustration. She said, “Judging by the chatter at lunch, I’d say you’re right.”

  Some people in the café, The Goddess’s Hearth, had speculated about the murder as some kind of satanic ritual. They might be on track. Those blaming otherworldly creatures absolutely were not. What was it with this town and woo-woo?

  “There’s other strange factors we’ve managed to keep a lid on,” Burton said. “Report’s in the file, but I’ll go ahead and tell you, most of Miss Baldwin’s blood was gone, and what was left had a strange substance in it Milledge couldn’t identify. Like the Great Dismal case.”

  Mel shook her head. “Curiouser and curiouser, as the saying goes. But you think the yard is the murder scene, even with no blood?”

  “We do.” Rubbing his chin, he added, “There’s signs of a struggle in the grass. Anyway, Milledge recommended a toxicology consult, so I phoned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Their top choice is a fellow who’s just an hour or so away.” His glance shifted past her. “And here he is.”

  Before Mel could turn around, a man spoke in a rich, clear baritone behind her. “Good morning, Angela, Corey,” he said to the clerk and dispatcher.

  A shiver of recognition rocked through Mel. But surely this couldn’t be Stefan Harper. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder at the man strolling around the end of the counter and into the territory reserved for those with badges and weapons.

  Oh, God, it was him.

  Her heart skipped a beat. A buzz filled her ears, and she lost the thread of the sheriff’s comments. Stefan Harper. Voice of an archangel, hands of a sex god. Or so she’d once described him, back when she’d thought he was the one person who loved her completely, who was wholly in her corner.

  Her mistake.

  “Hey, Stefan.” Sheriff Burton walked forward to meet him.

  Mel turned hastily back to the desk, toying with the paper in the file. She was over him, had been for years. So why wouldn’t her breathing settle? It must be the shock of seeing him. It could only be that.

  Instead of the jeans and T-shirt combo he’d favored in med school, he wore a charcoal suit that fit as though it’d been tailored for him. Otherwise, he hadn’t changed in the past nine years. Same thick, dark hair neatly combed but in need of a trim. Same strong chin and straight, aristocratic nose. Same serious brown eyes with gold glints that never showed in photos.

  Same generous mouth so adept at rousing her body.

  Breathe, damn it.

  “Thanks for coming,” Sheriff Burton said, his gravelly voice a sharp contrast to Stefan’s almost liquid one. “I don’t guess you’ve had a chance to go to the hospital yet.”

  “No, sorry. I’ll listen in on the press conference from the back, then talk to the crime scene unit before I go to the morgue. Milledge agreed to meet me there.”

  “That works. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the FBI agent working with us on this.”

  Footsteps came closer. Mel steeled herself. Deep breath. In. Out. In.

  “Stefan, this is Special Agent Wray. Mel, meet Dr. Stefan Harper, our medical consultant.”

  Mel squared her shoulders and turned to greet the man who had broken her heart.

  Chapter 2

  Stefan’s chocolate-brown eyes widened in shock, then narrowed, then turned bland, all in the space of a heartbeat. His steady gaze held no trace of the heat she’d once inspired. Or the hurt she’d seen when they’d last met.

  Neither of which she wanted to see, so why the hell was her heart skipping like a kid playing hopscotch?

  He gave her a little nod. “Cami. Good to see you again.” He extended his hand. Touching him was the last thing she wanted to do, but she couldn’t refuse.

  She pasted her most businesslike smile on her face. “Likewise,” she lied, in a steady voice at odds with her irrational and obviously hormonal pulse. When their hands touched, she had to clench her jaw against the zing that went up her arm. The slight narrowing of his eyes said he’d felt it, too. But he could dream on if he thought she’d admit to feeling the sizzle. Not after all this time. No way.

  “I go by Mel now,” she said, pleased that her voice was steady and strong. The less girlish name served her better in the male-dominated world of law enforcement.

  “Oh, y’all know each other,” the sheriff said. “Great. Saves time.”

  The dispatcher, Angela, called Burton to the phone, leaving Mel and Stefan in awkward silence. Suddenly, she realized she was still grasping his hand. She released it and took a small step
back without even meaning to. Damn it.

  Squaring her shoulders, she looked him straight in the eye. “Sheriff Burton said you were from this area. Where are you practicing?”

  A cool, ironic smile flickered over his mouth. “I’m the chief in-house physician at the Georgia Institute for Paranormal Research, near Brunswick.”

  She stopped the No, really just before it slipped out. Something in that smile of his dared her to say it.

  “Does that involve a lot of toxicology?” She managed to make her voice cool and professional instead of snide.

  “You’ll find a list of my papers on the Institute website. There are a few on toxicology.”

  He sounded casual, but she had the distinct impression of a gauntlet flung. More than anyone, he knew how intensely she hated this woo-woo crap, and why. He was the only person she’d told about how she’d been ostracized, even bullied, in her small, rural hometown because of her mother’s persistent public advocacy of far-out New Age ideas. But that wasn’t the point. Mel couldn’t trust the resolution of Cinda’s case to such nonsense. He’d been brilliant once, but that wasn’t good enough. Paranormal research, my ass.

  “You know,” she said, “the Bureau has toxicologists on staff. Now that we’re involved, Sheriff Burton could save what are probably scarce funds.” And he would opt for those savings just as soon as she had the chance to bend his ear.

  “The sheriff likes having someone who knows the ground,” Stefan replied, and her blood pressure spiked. Still smiling, he added, “Besides, I’m interested now.”

  Joining them, Dan Burton chuckled. “You don’t need to worry, Mel. Everybody in town knows Stefan. We’ll get value for our money.”