Read Online Demon Marked by Meljean Brook - Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t use the dungeon, so he might go anyway.”
    It took Taylor a second to sort that out. “So twisty.”
    “He thinks like a demon at times. So I will, too.” Rosalia turned to go, then paused, her gaze sweeping over the courtyard. “It’s so empty. I forget. I turn around, expecting to see everyone . . . but they are all gone.”
    “Not empty. I think Khavi’s hellhound is running around somewhere.” A pet as big as a Hummer, straight out of Hell and Taylor’s nightmares. She avoided the three-headed puppy as much as possible. “And hopefully, I’ll be called to make more of us soon. Well, maybe not ‘hopefully,’ considering that means someone has to die. But you know.”
    Rosalia gave her another of those long, seeing-too-much looks. “You are not feeling inadequate in that way, I hope? Because it is beyond your control, Taylor.”
    Yes, it was. That didn’t mean Taylor didn’t feel responsible. Along with the psychic connection, Michael had also passed to her the powers of the Doyen. She’d become the Guardian who transformed the humans who sacrificed themselves while saving someone else from a supernatural threat.
    But Taylor hadn’t been called, not in the year she’d been Doyen. Everyone told her that there had been times when a decade had passed before a new Guardian had been transformed . . . but those had also been the times when there had been thousands of Guardians to take up the slack. In five hundred years, the Gates to Hell would open, and the Guardian corps needed to be thousands strong again. They couldn’t afford to have one month go by without adding a new warrior to their ranks, let alone twelve months.
    There wouldn’t have been any more transformed if Michael had still been Doyen, either. She knew that. The Guardians couldn’t go out on a recruitment drive; everything depended on a human’s sacrifice. Still, she did feel added pressure, because Michael was gone and the corps wasn’t as strong without him. She needed to be transforming more Guardians. Their survival—every human’s survival—might eventually depend on it.
    “Let’s just say that I know exactly how one of those oldtime queens felt, when everyone was expecting her to produce an heir to the throne, and years go by without one. Pretty soon, you know she’s going to get beheaded and he’s going to find another woman to make the babies.”
    Amusement shone in Rosalia’s eyes, a warm golden light. “I remember a few queens like that. The clever ones solved the problem by inviting another man to their bed.”
    Oh, this metaphor was suddenly heading somewhere that Taylor definitely didn’t want to go. Having Michael in her head was enough to become accustomed to, and she’d carefully not thought much about sex while he was in there. Mostly so that he wouldn’t know that he figured prominently in those thoughts, but letting him see her imagining another man seemed just as bad.
    “I don’t think there’s a good ‘another man’ that works as a comparison.” The problem didn’t come from Michael or any other Guardian. “The humans just need to stop shooting blanks.”
    Rosalia’s soft laugh didn’t echo in the courtyard. Strange, but Taylor’s did.
    And even more strange, when her laughter faded and Rosalia had gone, she glanced back at Michael’s temple again . . . and the hairline cracks in the marble had vanished.
    She just hoped to God that if her laugh had sealed them, that it had helped Michael a little, too.
     
    On the plane, Ash waited until Nicholas occupied himself with his computer before looking through the few items he’d had of Rachel’s. When they’d stopped outside his hotel, she’d waited in the car while he’d retrieved Rachel’s passport and his luggage—and he’d brought down another small packet with them. He’d claimed the things had been in Rachel’s overnight case along with her identification, but Ash could have deduced that for herself. The packet contained a