scene unfolding before her as the man she’d watch die moments ago fought an opponent like a master swordsman. His long blade slashing at a smaller, quicker man with flames in his eyes, Santos laughed, throwing his head back, enjoying this fight, thrilling to the challenge, the danger.
She felt his joy in the battle, and his complete confidence in his abilities and wanted to laugh with him. But what was happening? What were her visions showing her? They’d never been this disjointed before. Never showed her a man dying only to show him alive and well and…she looked around and caught sight of a small green and white sign…in San Diego?
Erin stood on a modern city street and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. It couldn’t be true. He’d died centuries before. Yet here he was now, in this time. Her time. Healthy. Alive.
His dark eyes were the same. His features were harsher, sterner, but still, it was him. The man she’d seen on the sailing ship. The man who had reached across a chasm of centuries to connect with her at the moment of his death.
The man she’d seen stabbed and drowned.
“Another day, Guardian!” The small man screamed in rage, and then the sword fight ended in a blurring shift of color and light and then Santos was alone under the hazy yellow glow of a streetlamp.
“Cowardly demon,” Santos muttered, sliding his sword into the scabbard he wore beneath his long black coat. “Shifting to escape a battle. Does no one have honor anymore?”
“Demon?” Erin whispered, wondering what the hell he was talking about.
Santos whirled around, instinctively pulling a knife from his belt and dropping into a crouch as his long black coat swirled out around him. He scowled, narrowed his gaze and stared directly into Erin’s eyes, as he had before during the storm on the ship.
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
