The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) (8 page)

             
Callie watched her speak with a surprised sort of disbelief. “Do you always speak in dictionary quotations?” she asked.

             
Shay ate another piece of fruit, oblivious to the potential insult. Callie couldn’t keep herself from grinning, and scooped up her own piece of fruit.

             
“You remind me of my sister,” Callie said. She flashed back to a particular memory and felt a sense of lightness. “When we were younger, she was the smart one. I think she would have loved you.”

             
“She is not smart anymore?” Shay asked.

             
Callie felt her smile fade a little. “No,” she said. “I mean, that’s not it. She’s still smart, I guess. She just spends her days working in a Chili’s now for eight-fifty an hour.”

             
She saw Maggie’s face again then, drifting towards the front of her mind. She shut her eyes, blocking out the image. She knew what she had to do to get back to Maggie. Thinking about her now, worrying about her when she couldn’t do anything, wasn’t going to help.

             
Callie opened her eyes and forced herself to smile at Shay. “You do what you’ve got to do, I guess,” she said with a careless shrug.

             
Shay wasn’t paying attention to Callie’s facial nuances. She was looking out the window, at the sky, appearing bored. Her posture reminded Callie of Alex, the way he had worn the exact same mask this morning.

             
“What’s the deal with that tall guy? Alex, I think his name is? He never talks,” Callie said. “He looks sort of…generally pissed off.”

             
Shay blinked at Callie, and she realized that the Aztec woman was probably unfamiliar with the term.

             
“You know,” Callie said. “Angry.”

             
“He’s one of Emeric’s most loyal protectors,” Shay replied.

             
“What do you mean?” Callie asked.

             
“He is the soldier Emeric chooses above all others when faced with a difficult mission.”

             
“A mission,” Callie repeated, not sure what the woman meant. “You make him sound like James Bond.”

             
Shay regarded her with a blank stare. Callie rolled her eyes, the culture clashes beginning to grow tiresome. “Never mind,” she said.

             
“I don’t know what James Bond is,” Shay said. “Though I can tell you that Alexander is one of the oldest of our kind. And he is the most successful protector.”

             
“Isn’t Emeric the most successful guy here?” Callie asked, surprised. “I mean, the way you all seem to worship him, it kind of seems like he is.”

             
Shay shook her head. “You are confusing the terms,” she explained. “Emeric is merely a Guardian, he is not a protector. A Guardian is a member of our species. It is a word which can be used to refer to our general population, those of us who live here in the canopy. But there is another term used to describe a much more selective portion of the population. A protector is something of a soldier, acting on Emeric’s behalf. These men and women perform Emeric’s bidding, often sent out to observe and manipulate events in human societies. I suppose that the terminology complicates things.”

             
“I suppose,” Callie replied with a laugh, though she understood it somewhat. “What do they do? The second kind of Guardian, I mean.”

             
“No one knows, except for Emeric and the particular protector whom he has assigned to a case. Those are Emeric’s secrets; though I must say, he makes no secret of the fact that Alex is sent away the most. This leaves one to deduce that Alex is his most trusted protector.”

             
“Well, sure,” Callie replied. “With such a sparkling personality, who wouldn’t trust him?”

             
“No, I don’t believe it has anything to do with his personality,” Shay replied seriously.

             
Callie watched Shay for a moment, waiting for some sign that she was joking. She couldn’t honestly have completely missed the sarcasm there. But Shay didn’t let on that she was joking, and so Callie shook her head with a disbelieving smile.

             
“Okay,” Callie said. She pushed up from the chair she was sitting on. “I am now exiting crazy town.”

             
“You are not in—“

             
Callie held up a hand as she walked away, silencing the correction which she knew Shay was about to make. She walked towards the door, feeling a twinge in her lower back from sleeping on the couch. She needed to walk off the stiffness in her muscles. A walk would wake her up a little; her mind was still somewhat foggy from whatever Shay had put into her drink the night before.

             
Maybe that fogginess was what caused Callie to forget about the dozens of feet between the threshold and the ground. Maybe it was simply due to the fact that she was used to stepping out of a door and landing on a solid surface. Either way, Callie stepped confidently out the door…

             
…into the fifteen stories of blank air that lie beneath her.

Chapter
Five

Enemy Lines

             
Callie watched wit
h
horror as the ground soared up to meet her. She was spiraling downwards, her body spinning slowly even as it sank with rapid speed. She might have screamed, or been sick, or uttered a hundred different curses in the time that it took for her to plummet through those millions of miles of air. She wasn’t sure exactly.

             
But she was sure of what happened next. Suddenly, something which felt like a thick metal bar jerked her rudely out of her decent. It winded her slightly as it yanked against her stomach, pulling her upwards and away from the mossy executioner that was the forest floor. She choked, struggling to catch her breath, as she floated through the sky.

             
And then, in the next second, she saw the doorway from which she had just fallen. As she sucked desperately for breath, she managed to realize that the home she had been in for the past day or so was actually a cottage, nestled into a treetop. She had never seen anything like it; the tree trunk was made up of the same knotted cords that she’d seen from the cave yesterday, and then the branches opened on top like massive, thick petals of a flower. In that little hollow, secured on all sides by these branches, stood the sleepy cottage, built of dark wood and rope.

             
She only had a moment to observe all of this, however, before she was soaring once again through the door of the cottage, and found Shay sitting at the counter, still picking through the cubed fruit as though nothing had happened.

             
She could feel now that what she’d assumed to be a metal bar was actually a pair of arms, hugging her securely to a sturdy chest. She was dropped onto the couch, and landed with a small grunt. Looking up, she saw that it was Alex who had caught her, and he was now gazing down at her with an incredulous mixture of shock and amusement.

             
She huffed, pushing to her feet once again. “Well, you would have fallen, too, if you were used to there being…oh, I don’t know, a
floor
when you stepped out of a door.”

             
He didn’t reply, his face betraying nothing of his thoughts. Instead, he turned on his heel and walked towards the door, about to leave.

             
“Wait!” Callie called, surprised to find that she didn’t want him to leave yet. He paused, though didn’t turn around. She approached him tentatively, not wanting to surprise him. “How did you do that?” she asked. “How did you see me falling?”

             
“Emeric has him watching you,” Shay inserted promptly. Both Callie and Alex looked towards her. Shay turned in her chair to meet their gazes without a trace of doubt on her face. She shrugged her tiny shoulders awkwardly, and Callie suspected that Shay was mimicking her in an attempt to learn a new behavior. “It is just a guess,” she continued. “But if I were Emeric, I would want to protect my investment.”

             
Callie returned her eyes to Alex’s back. She didn’t mind, for the moment, being compared to property. She didn’t mind that he had an odd habit of not speaking. She realized that this was not the first time that he had saved her, and so she murmured, “Thank you.”

             
He turned his head slightly, and she saw his profile as he looked down at the floor. He nodded in acknowledgement, and she thought that he was about to say something. He may well have, except that at that moment, a violent scream rang out through the treetops, rippling towards them.

             
Callie jumped at the sound. She had forgotten that they were not the only three people in this forest. She saw Alex jerk his head upwards, and imagined that he was searching the perimeter for the person screaming. He didn’t move, though, and Callie took that to be a sign that the person was nowhere near.

             
In a split second, Alex’s wings suddenly shot out, causing Callie to jump backwards. She watched as he stepped backwards, his enormous white wings drawing nearer, so that she was completely blocked from view to whomever might have been outside. She couldn’t see over the wings, but just then she heard a voice.

             
“Alex,” a woman called. Callie heard a flutter of air, felt the gust of a breeze. Someone was outside the door, having just flown towards them.

             
“What is it?” she heard him growl, his voice shockingly harsh. She focused on the feathers in front of her, near enough that if she simply lifted a hand now, she could reach out and touch them. They were longer than she’d expected, and appeared downy and soft. They protruded from a pucker of pink skin which ran from the bottoms of his shoulder blades to his lower ribs. The two bases of his wings never touched, leaving a bronze patch of bare skin along his spine. After that, the wings extended in graceful arches, reaching outwards as they spread in each direction.

             
“Emeric sent me,” the woman continued. “You and Shay are needed.”

             
Callie saw Alex’s back stiffen. She watched the contours of his ribs freeze into a more erect posture, his shoulders lifting with tension. Upon the play of skin, she could see the faint, pink line of a jagged scar running parallel to the base of his right wing. It was long and uneven, and Callie wondered what could have made such a mark.

             
His wings dropped, folding once more behind his back now that he sensed no threat. Callie was able to peek over his shoulder from where she stood behind him, and saw a Guardian hovering outside of the cottage.

             
But this Guardian looked nothing like the ones Callie had seen so far. She had fluid, effervescent hair hanging down to her hips, each strand the color of sunlight. Her small figure was adorned in the same white, backless dress which Shay wore, allowing freedom of motion for her wings, and though it was a simple style, on this woman it might as well have been a ball gown. Her delicate face was the color of fresh cream, her cheekbones tainted a shade of strawberries. Her blue eyes slanted a disdainful look in Callie’s direction.

She looked like
one of the Greek gods that Callie had read about as a child, and Callie was sure that she had never seen anyone so exquisitely lovely. It hurt to look at her, as Callie knew that she would never have a hope of even being compared to this creature.