I glanced back at the charred wood. “Ugh. Now I’m a pyromaniac.”

“Nothing so serious, although you will probably want to learn how to empower your wards without drawing on fire.”

Jim snorted. “As if.”

I didn’t say anything as I followed Nora and Jim out of the tube station. Jim’s words echoed in my head with worrisome intensity. What if my demon was right? What if I couldn’t draw a ward without pulling on Drake’s fire? I struggled with the need to keep the Guardian part of myself separate from Drake.

If I couldn’t do this on my own, what did that say about my abilities?

12

“Salut. You would like a ride, yes?”

We stopped at the top of the stairs that led down into the tube station. Next to us, blithely parked in a tow-away zone, a man sat smiling at us from the confines of a black taxi.

I wasn’t surprised to see him any more than I was to see he’d acquired a new taxi. “Hi, Rene. We’re only a couple of blocks from our new home, but sure, a ride would be nice. And maybe if you have the time, you can come in and say hi to Drake and his men.”

Nora greeted Rene and happily climbed into the taxi after Jim.

“It would be my pleasure, but is that not one of Drake’s men there? Perhaps he would like to join you?” Rene nodded toward the doorway of a small art gallery.

I turned to look. I didn’t see Pal or Istvan. “One of Drake’s men?”

“I cannot be certain, not having met all of them, but I did see a dragon slip into the gallery. I assumed he was watching you.”

“Dammit, Drake agreed to trust me.... I’ll be right back. Just let me go tell whichever of them it is that the jig’s up, and we’ll go home.” I marched into the gallery, mentally rehearsing the righteously indignant lecture I would give Drake. A quick scan of the main room showed it dragonless. I hurried through the other three, smaller, rooms, but none of them held anything but browsing artists and patrons.

It really wasn’t worth pursuing Pal or Istvan just to tell them I knew they were following me, but my pride was irked. Probably they’d seen me come into the gallery and were hiding from me... which irked me even more. After checking to make sure no one was around to see me, I slipped through a door marked private and found myself in an apparently empty office.

I walked into the room, my hands on my hips. “All right, I know you’re in here; you can stop ... oh, god.”

An odd whooshing noise interrupted me, but it was the sharp blow of pain in my back and odd burning feeling in my stomach that had me looking down.

The long, curved blade of a sword emerged from my front.

“Holy shit,” I swore, my brain shocked into numbness as I tried to absorb the fact that there was a sword sticking through me.

A voice behind me snarled something in a guttural language. I spun around and was knocked backwards by a blow to the face. I managed to twist and land on my side rather than my back, some instinct of preservation keeping me from driving the sword any farther through my body.

Above me stood a dragon, all right. But it wasn’t one of Drake’s men. This dragon was Chinese and wore a black leather jacket with a red bandanna tied around his face. In his left hand he held a starlike spiky weapon that he aimed at my heart.

“No!” I shrieked at the red dragon, frantically trying to roll out of the way. The blade sticking through me made it difficult to move. My mind was shrieking all sorts of warnings and orders, all of them conflicting and sending me quickly toward a full-fledged panic attack. With a desperation born of frenzy, I opened the door in my head, pulling on Drake’s fire to give me strength. A fireball the likes of which I had never seen formed in front of me and hurled at the red dragon.

It was then I realized my mistake. Fighting a dragon with fire was like adding gasoline to a blaze. The dragon laughed for a moment, then absorbed the fire and lifted his hand to throw the weapon at me. I cursed my foolishness, hurling a chair at him as I dragged my wounded self behind the safety of the desk. The dragon said something in Chinese, destroying the chair with a couple of deft moves.

I started drawing a binding ward on him, hoping to slow him down so I could get out of the room and get some help, but I didn’t finish it before he grabbed me by my hair and yanked me up next to him.

“You die now,” he snarled, his eyes glowing reddish brown as he spun the throwing star in the air, snatching it back to press against my jugular.

“I’m immortal,” I gasped, my right hand trying to finish the ward.

“You can die,” he answered. A moment later, the door burst open... but it wasn’t help that swarmed into the room in a violent yellow wave.

“Oh, god, it’s the imps,” I moaned, wondering which of them—the red dragon or the imps—would finish me off first.

As soon as that morbid thought formed in my head, self-preservation kicked in and I slammed another bolt of fire into the red dragon, sending him flying back onto the mass of imps. Imps being what they are, they stopped to attack the dragon rather than continue past him for me. I’ll always be grateful for that fact, because it gave me time to scramble over the desk, using another chair to break the window that led to a small service alley behind the gallery.

The dragon was screaming out curses as he beat the imps off him, but more were pouring in through the door. I didn’t wait around to see what happened. Careful of the sword still jutting from my belly, I got out the window and dropped to the ground. The impact sent me to my knees, but it took me only a couple of seconds before I was racing down the alley, praying Rene would still be out in front of the building. I hurled myself around the corner into the mass of people streaming out of the tube station, ignoring the cries of surprise around me as people noticed the sword. Ahead of me sat a black taxi with an open door. I lunged to it, half falling inside it with a sob of gratitude on my lips.

“Oh, thank god. You have no idea how grateful I am to see you. A red dragon tried to kill me, and the imps found me, and I have a sword sticking out of me!”

I allowed helpful hands to pull me off the floor of the taxi to the seat, turning as the taxi shot forward.

The eyes I met as I pushed my hair out of my face were not the ones I was expecting.

“Who are you?” I asked the blond woman who sat next to me.

“My name is Obedama. I am servant of the lord Ariton. You are summoned before him, Guardian.”