Hungry Like a Wolf

Read on for an excerpt from Christine Warren’s next book HEART OF STONE

Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks

He had slept for so long that he had nearly forgotten what the world sounded like.

Centuries of frozen immobility had lulled him into a kind of trance, where the cares of the mortal world washed by him like the babbling of a stream, barely teasing the edges of his unconscious mind. If danger had presented itself, real danger, the kind he had been created to battle against, he knew the magic that allowed his slumber would have allowed a swift reawakening. Guardians, after all, were useless when they couldn’t be relied upon to instantly counter any threat. But for hundreds upon hundreds of years, the world had buzzed along safely, a tacit reassurance that he and his brethren had done their jobs thoroughly and well. Evil had remained at bay. That had not changed.

Everything else had.

He didn’t remember the day he had come to this particular place, this stone terrace poised atop a small garden, the large house to his side, and the incessant backdrop of noise, both mechanical and human. By the time he had come here, he had moved so many times and so far from his original post in the center of France that he had ceased to keep so close an eye on his whereabouts. He would know if the threat he guarded against had stirred, and nowhere in his journeys had even the faintest whiff of threat pierced his slumber. The world had rested at peace while he had rested in eternal readiness.

Now, however, something must have changed.

The fog of sleep had ebbed and flowed around him for some time now, how long he couldn’t say, but lately something had cut through it. A voice. A scent. The disturbing presence of one particular human. The woman.

He couldn’t remember when she had first begun to appear at the edges of his consciousness, but he would never forget the sudden rush of awareness he’d felt when she’d first laid her small hand on his stony skin. One minute he’d been dozing, and the next he’d felt life flood through him as if a bolt of lightning had struck directly into his chest.

Since that moment, he had watched her. He knew when she came near, as if she carried that electrical charge with her wherever she went, rousing him from his slumber just enough to stare through the stony film over his eyes and see her moving about his domain.

Sometimes, she would pause in front of him and gaze up into his fierce, carved features and speak of him. At least, he thought she spoke of him. She told the humans that he had come from France by way of England, purchased at an auction by a wealthy man who lived north of the city. She said he had been carved from limestone, but of course she couldn’t know how he and his brethren had been made all those centuries ago. If he had noticed one thing over the years, it was that the longer he existed, the fewer humans seemed to understand the magic that permeated their world. It made them even more vulnerable than they had been when the Guardians had last faced down a threat to their continued survival.

Like lambs milling at the edge of the forest, easy prey to any creature with claws and teeth.

He couldn’t recall the last time he had seen a human working magic. Being frozen in place didn’t give him the opportunity to see more than a small sampling of them, and often only the young ones, but he had seen not a spark of power in any of them, not in an age.

Until tonight.

He had felt her gaze on him, a warmth that soaked into his stony skin like a beam of sunlight. She stood for a few minutes watching him, as she often did when she came into his presence, and as always, something about her pulled him from the depths into the shallower pool of his slumber. Sometimes, she spoke directly to him, much of it nonsense about the troubles of her day, but this time she said nothing.

Still, he could feel her presence, her warmth, the soft curve of her hip as it pressed against the side of his foot, her shoulder brushing up against his lower leg. She felt so fragile, so human, that it took a moment for his sluggish mind to process that she also felt like magic.

It hummed softly, almost imperceptibly in the background all around her, like a halo of static electricity. It sparked against his stony skin wherever she touched him, and he wondered how he could have missed it all the other times she had been near him. Magic hated to be contained. Like sunlight, it would seek out the smallest crack and crevice, the thinnest barrier, and beat relentlessly against it until it inevitably found its way through.

Adrenaline rushed through him.

Invigorated, he began to struggle in earnest. Something was happening, something significant, and this human woman appeared to be the cause. He wanted to know why. His slumber should have lasted until and unless the threat he had been created to counter had stirred. Kees felt no indications that any such thing had happened, so why did he appear to be waking now? Why here? And why did this human seem to hold the key to finding the answers?

His human grew more intriguing by the minute.

And he grew closer to breaking free.

His human stirred, shifted as if to rise, and the magic coursed through him like an electric current, lighting every nerve ending with fierce energy. She was the source, and he couldn’t let her leave until he discovered how.

One moment he crouched poised on his pedestal, frozen in the same position he had occupied for more than a thousand years, and the next, he and the human stood in unison, stretching to their full heights, his even fuller due to the three feet of slate beneath his talons. She rose in a nearly silent shift of cloth, but after so long in his fixed pose, Kees heard the crack of stone as he lifted himself to his feet.

His human heard it, too.

He saw the exact instant the sound and movement registered. She froze in place, her back to him, her every muscle tensing with the rush of primal awareness that signaled danger was near. He intended her no harm, but her instincts wouldn’t know that. To them, something huge and fanged and supernatural had just stepped into their orbit. Even before she turned and saw him, Kees knew that the most basic, animal portion of her brain would be screaming at her to run. Fight or flight, and even the electrical and chemical impulses in her brain possessed enough intelligence to know that against him, to fight would be futile.

Her only chance for survival, her instincts would tell her, was to run. Now.

She hesitated just a fraction too long.

With a shift and a flex of muscles long unused, Kees gave his wings half a beat and launched himself into the air above her head, landing easily a few feet in front of her. For the first time he saw her face with no veil between them. Her features were soft and even, her lips bow-shaped, her eyes wide and gray with no hint of blue or green to muddle their purity. And in that moment, they stared at him in pure, frozen terror.

Lifting a hand, he stepped forward. “I won’t hurt you.”