Smacked by the Goddess was more like it. He’d been standing there, minding his own business, never dreaming he was a good candidate for Guardian. He’d attended the Choosing only because every male past their Transition in his mother’s clan was required to.

A shaft of light had struck him, pulling him off his feet. While Kendrick’s heart had pounded in terror the clan leader had announced, “The Goddess has Chosen.”

Since that day, the damned sword had been singing to him, either so faintly as to blend into the background, or, like now, soaring into a resounding chorus.

Kendrick knew its music could save his life. He dragged himself forward, angling through the rock fall toward the humming sword.

Light flashed. Kendrick froze, expecting Lachlan to come climbing over the rubble and shoot him, but the light emanated from the ground and not from a flashlight.

The runes on the sword were flashing in the gloom, letters outlined with fire. Not all the Guardians bothered to learn what the inscriptions said—and Kendrick acknowledged that a lot of it was gibberish to him. He’d taught himself to read the ancient Fae he could decipher, so he could understand part of it.

One of the lines was in invocation of the Goddess, similar to the ones Shifters used to begin any ceremony of worship:

Goddess, mother of us all, lady of the moon, we beseech thee to be with us.

Another line was an incantation to her husband the God, asking for his blessing.

Then there was the curious sentence Kendrick had mulled over for a long time:

The power lies not in one.

Not in one what? Or not in one person but more than one? In that case, why was the Guardian the only person who could wield the sword? If another Shifter caught it up and stuck it through a dead Shifter’s heart, the Shifter’s body would remain intact, but with a sword sticking out of it.

A few months ago, a non-Guardian Shifter, Broderick, had performed a Guardian duty on a dead Guardian in Montana, but from what Kendrick had gleaned, Broderick had been temporarily Goddess-touched at the time.

Here Kendrick was, all alone, the sword singing away, telling him to get his butt over there and rescue it. Growling, Kendrick squirmed and wriggled over to the sword, pushing more debris out of his path as he went.

The sword lay on top of a pile of crushed stone, just out of reach. Of course. Kendrick clawed his way to a relatively open spot—not much space between the fallen stone and what was left of the ceiling.

He reached up, his between-beast claws changing back to a human hand so he could wrap his fingers around the hilt.

Instantly the sword went into paroxysms of joy. The sword jangled and sang, vibrating on the rocks.

“Shut up,” Kendrick told it in irritation. “You’ll bring the rest of the ceiling down.”

The sword muted its song the slightest bit but the happy noise went on. Kendrick knew it couldn’t be heard except by himself—maybe others couldn’t see the glowing runes either. Kendrick was just one lucky sod, wasn’t he?

The tunnel seemed to be filled fairly uniformly from the cave-in, the narrow crawl space near the ceiling sloping a little way down to the sides of the corridor. Kendrick knew that whichever direction he went, he was likely to find a total collapse in his way or he’d cause one.

But what the hell? He couldn’t stay here debating about it. Kendrick picked a direction and started crawling.

He’d gone, he calculated, about twenty yards, the sword lighting his way, when he heard sounds. He snarled at the sword, which was humming in his ears, to shut up again and listened as hard as he could.

The noises were groans. Eventually, Kendrick distinguished them into separate ones, two of them, one louder than the other. They were male voices, of Shifters in great pain, unable to make any sounds but the moans that came from their throats.