"Jonny is. I don't know about you yet."
Darian took this in. He didn't consider what others might think of him, outside of his family. He didn't think of himself as unsalvageable in the least. He would never be what he once was, but he wasn't Jonny, headed down a dark path. He was headed down his own path, that of the Grey God, a creature that never existed before him.
"We all make our choices," he said, puzzled. "Or maybe this isn't about me at all."
"There's a station near here. I called in an order for some equipment. Should be there this evening." Her gaze went north.
Just like that, she was cool and professional again.
"Wait," he said and took her wrist.
"Don't touch me, Darian," she warned and yanked away.
"You're just going to open a can of worms and walk away?"
"We have work to do."
She pushed the location of the station into his mind then disappeared, Traveling without him. Darian lingered, unable to figure out exactly what was wrong. The cool, sexy Jenn he'd sparred with was incapable of being ruffled. Now, she was edgy and terse with him.
He circled the portal once again, stalling, before finally Traveling to the nearby station. The two Guardians assigned to the small adobe house in the middle of a Mexican village stood out front with Jenn. The small town had only dirt roads, and his glanced lingered towards a farmers market under the awnings in the center, a couple of blocks away. The scent of barbacoa made his stomach rumble.
The two large Hispanic Guardians glanced towards him when he entered the yard marked by a stone fence.
"Darian, this is Chapo and Larry," Jenn said as he approached. "Ikir Damian's brother, Darian."
"A pleasure," the man named Chapo said and shook Darian's hand.
"They've seen some guardsmen come through here," Jenn told Darian.
"We've adhered to Ikir's mandate of no engagement, though we followed them around," Chapo told Darian. "Looks like they were scouting the town. Came through twice a few days ago and haven't seen them since."
"Might be a good thing Guardians are largely powerless," Darian said. "You might've had some nasty visitors otherwise." He couldn't imagine waking up to find an Other sitting in the corner. He'd thought the Guardians' loss of magic a curse until he started thinking about how the Others couldn't sense a Guardian that had no magic.