Guardian Demon (GUARDIAN SERIES) Read Free

Taylor had barely stopped herself from telling Khavi to fuck off. The seer hadn’t predicted that Michael would turn into a dragon. Obviously, she didn’t know his nature as well as she thought.
    Neither did Taylor. She’d known Michael wasn’t a normal Guardian. She’d known that he was the son of the demon Belial and a human woman. She’d known that demons weren’t fertile; to impregnate a human, Michael’s father had first consumed the flesh and blood of a dragon and his body had been transformed by it. She’d known all of that, but who could have guessed that Michael’s soul would
become
a dragon? Not Taylor, though he’d lived in her brain. Not even Khavi, who was the offspring of another human and demon pairing.
    Now that dragon might be coming after Taylor, and none of them knew whether a bit of Michael still existed in that form, or if he was like the dragons in the Chaos realm: hungry, destructive, and almost unstoppable. They were all hoping that Michael was still himself, because he’d always protected Taylor. But the truth was . . . he might just eat her.
    God. What had she done to deserve this? She’d been a good daughter, a good cop. She’d never betrayed a friend. She’d never cheated on a lover. She’d never deliberately hurt anyone—well, aside from the criminals she’d had to throw down, but they didn’t count.
    Life wasn’t fair. Taylor knew that. All too often, decent people were hurt and the bad ones got away with it. Tweakers killed good cops and then had their charges reduced after ratting out their dealers. Mothers worked their fingers to the bone, then handed over their salaries to pay someone else to care for their comatose sons. There were millions of people who deserved better and got worse, and that was just the way the world worked. But if some almighty being was up there giving out superpowers to Guardians and transforming angels into demons, Taylor thought life
should
be fair. People
should
get what they deserved.
    Taylor didn’t deserve to be eaten by a dragon. But that was exactly how this fishing expedition might end.
    And
that
would be a really stupid way to go out.
    If she did become dragon chow, though, it would be her own fault. She could have refused to act as bait. She could have told Khavi to fuck off. The other Guardians would have respected her decision. But the world needed Michael back, and Taylor needed to be free of him. If that meant playing the worm, she’d play the worm.
    So here she was, walking through Hell, hoping that he’d come for her. After he arrived, Khavi had a plan to trick him back into his body—a plan she hadn’t shared with Taylor, because through her psychic connection with Michael, he would know it, too. Of course, through their connection, he would know they planned something. He might already be a few steps ahead of them.
    Or behind her.
    A faint rasp sounded, like the scuff of a foot over sand. Heart jumping into her throat, Taylor whipped around. She scanned the barren territory, her eyes and weapon moving as one.
    Nothing. Only the jagged boulders, strewn across the wasteland as if a god had crushed a mountain in his fist and tossed the pieces away.
    A god . . . or Lucifer.
    A shiver ran over her skin. Taylor forced the demon’s name from her mind. Thinking about the lord of Hell probably wouldn’t alert him to her presence in his realm, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Khavi had deliberately brought her to a territory far away from the demon’s throne so that Taylor would escape his notice.
    Yet she must have attracted someone’s attention.
Something
had made that sound. On Earth, she might have blamed it on a breeze, but no wind blew in Hell. She held her breath, listening over the rapid beat of her own heart. Silence. But she couldn’t trust her ears. A Guardian’s hearing was far superior to a human’s, but her brain hadn’t fully recalibrated since her transformation. When Michael had been a strong