Guardian (50 page)

“There are many ways,” Rafael murmured, his mouth trailing up across my collarbone and to my neck, his breath hot against my skin.

“Somehow, I doubt that one of them involves kissing!” I said breathlessly.

Rafael supported the back of my head, lifting it up a little so he could look me in the eye. “I never said I was a good angel,” he teased.

I rolled my eyes, and Rafael tensed as he moved his mouth upward to whisper in my ear.

“This is done by me giving part of myself to you. In all my time on Earth, I have carried two flames inside of me. In giving one to you, you become one of us. Lyla Evans, do you wish to become a Fallen angel?”

“I do.” My voice was calm and assured, totally ready.

“Then let us begin our life, our real life, together.”

A brilliant, searing white light illuminated the dim woods and backyard, blinding anyone who happened to be watching.

KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT OF BOOK 2, PROTECTOR

All my life, I have been afraid. Afraid and alone. Even surrounded by people, I was always on my own. Defenseless against those hurting me. I
’
ve always had to fend for myself. Never did I think I would find someone who could protect me. Who would stand beside me for all of eternity. Who could save me from all my fears, could simply banish them into the night.

And yet here he stands next to me.

All my life I’ve been lied to. Ever since I can remember—ever since my mom died, basically my first memory—they’ve told me lies.

“Oh yes, your father does love you, he’s just a very, very busy man.”

“Stop hurting yourself, there are better ways to get attention.”

“What would your father say if he saw you do that to yourself?”

I knew what my dad would say: nothing. Wasn’t that what his absence in my life meant? I saw him only sporadically throughout the year, and it was never just the two of us alone.

Besides, I wasn’t the one hurting myself.
They
were hurting me. All my life, it was me against
them
, and
they
always won. But I was done with all of this. If being out on my own was what it took to escape the physicians, doctors, psychiatrists, and research, so be it. I was done being called crazy.

And that was how I found myself, teeth chattering, swaying back and forth in the empty box of a railway car.

I sat stiffly, holding back whimpers of pain every time my arm was jerked or pinched. I could feel
it
breathing on my neck but the presence was so familiar I found it easy to block out when there was just one alone. I was bored, wondering when the train would ever stop and where I would be when it did. I was starving and hadn’t thought to stuff anything edible in my backpack. At the thought of buying food, the stretching of my cash, only $200, I was suddenly on a tight leash.

Lesson one learned, Izzy
, I thought to myself.
Remember the essentials to human life, like food, and then
pack
them!

The walls of the boxcar shook violently, and my eyes flew open once more as I looked around. To my bewilderment, there was suddenly someone else standing in what I had come to think of as
my
boxcar.

It was still dark outside, my escape having been planned for midnight, but I could clearly see the outline of a man standing just inside the open doors of the railway car. Somehow, some way, he had managed to jump aboard the moving train. But when he took one step into the box car and I sensed that the presence currently pulling my hair skittered away, combined with the lithe grace I saw in just that one step, I realized why he had been able to jump aboard the moving train.

He was one of
them
.

I tried to back farther into my corner, clutching my backpack as though it was a lifeline. In a way, it was. It kept me tied down to sanity, from losing myself completely. I’d made hardly any sound but I could tell he had heard me moving because his head snapped around in my direction, obviously able to see me in the darkness.

The richness of his deep, rumbly baritone filled every corner of the train. “Sorry, I didn’t know this car was occupied. I won’t be any bother.” He walked to the opposite corner from me and as he settled down on the hard floor, he looked much more comfortable and at ease than I was.

I stayed totally tense and rigid for a good fifteen minutes, my breath coming in short little gasps, my teeth chattering noisily in a combination of cold and now fear. I was terrified and kept my eyes trained on him, wondering what he would do next.

I didn’t wait in vain; barely five minutes later he stood up and walked toward me. I squeaked in fright and buried my face in my hands. I didn’t even want to see his face.

“Easy, easy.” His voice was like surround-sound speakers, pressing in on me from every side and making my chest rumble along with the noise. I had never heard anyone with such a powerfully commanding voice. Even as I retreated from it, in the back of my mind I sensed it wasn’t foreign, was something I had heard before.

I looked up at him through my fingers and saw with surprise that he was removing his coat, which was a dark brown with a bomber-style collar. Without another word, he semi-tossed the coat over me and retreated back to his corner. I heard him mutter something about my teeth chattering and I realized that he had done it because he had been annoyed.

Scared as I was, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I pulled the coat around me more securely, shivering in relief at the warmth still clinging to it from the stranger’s body. It smelled wonderful too, a mix of spicy man-smell and homey cleanliness, like fabric softener, a new, fresh scent I’d never encountered before.

I kept my body stiff and rigid however, never once relaxing or looking away from him. I would have to get off as soon as the train stopped. I had to get away from him. He might know my father. He might even have been sent after me and was just waiting for the right moment to take me back home. I had to constantly be on my guard.

In the end, the stress of having one of
them
right there next to me, along with the exhausting excitement of my escape, combined with staying up all night, caused me to fall into a dead sleep. When I woke up, the train had stopped and
he
was gone. I almost thought I had imagined him, but the proof he had been there was easy to see; he had left the jacket, and it was still draped over me, still practically radiating heat.

I didn’t know why I put it on and took it with me as I hopped off the train. It could have had fleas or lice or any number of nasty things, especially if the man was homeless. But it smelled so clean that I couldn’t convince myself it was dirty at all, and it was such a nice coat that I couldn’t bear to leave it on the dirty train.

Not that it mattered, in the end. I had barely gotten out onto the sidewalk away from the railway tracks when a police cruiser pulled up next to me and my grand adventure was cut abruptly short.

“Isadora!”

I cringed, turning to see Mrs. Turner, my longest-lasting nurse, rushing toward me. Everyone here called me Isadora, the name I hated. No matter how many times I pleaded with them to please, please call me Izzy, they refused. Only my mother had called me by my full name, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from anyone but her.

“Isadora St. James!” Mrs. Turner sputtered my name again, as though just my first name hadn’t been effective enough for the situation. She grabbed my arm and pushed back the sleeve of my own jacket, over which I still wore the stranger’s bomber jacket. My pale skin was a constellation of bruises, small cuts, scratches, and red pinch lines. There was even a handprint-shaped bruise that, when matched up, I knew would fit my own hand perfectly.

“You run away, and look what you do to yourself!” Mrs. Turner was horrified. “Upstairs,
now
. Medication, shower, bed. See if you get another moment to yourself ever again, young lady. Up you go.”

I obediently did as she asked, going through a routine that was so familiar, I could do it in my sleep, and often it felt like I did. I’d become an expert at the way my life was run, and even though I had recently turned sixteen, I was still treated like a six year old. Mrs. Turner coached my every motion, always directing me. Telling me to make sure I flossed after I brushed my teeth, getting the shower running for me before I got in, and insisting on inspecting the rest of the damage I had inflicted on myself in my less-than-twenty-four-hour flight from the haven of home.

After she had berated me for the wounds (the worst being a very nasty scratch that went from above my knee all the way down to my ankle), I was allowed to take my shower. While it stung my cuts and scratches, I welcomed the steamy water, staying in so long that Mrs. Turner had to come in and turn the water off when she thought I was standing in there trying to bruise myself again. But I was really and truly warm again at last. Then, dressed in pajamas and sitting in my big canopy bed, I obediently swallowed the three pills Mrs. Turner handed me with quiet sips of water.

“No more of this,” she hissed at me before leaving. “If you try anything, anything at all, I will come up here with more pills. Sleeping pills.”

I nodded obediently, and the fear must have shown in my eyes, because Mrs. Turner turned away, apparently satisfied I was taking her seriously. And I was. I hated taking sleeping pills. I couldn’t wake up when
they
were hurting me.

There was a time, back when I was about six years old, when I thought I was going crazy. That was when I was still allowed to leave the house, when I still went to my private school and was surrounded by children my own age. Two weeks after my mother died I had awakened after an extremely fitful and restless sleep filled with terrible nightmares, only to find that they had not been nightmares at all. My arms, legs, torso, even my cheeks, were spotted with small bruises and scratches.

My nanny thought I had done it to myself, to get attention from my father or out of grief from losing my mother. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but no one believed me when I told them I had felt the pain in my dreams, that someone else had done it to me. I was promptly bundled off to the psychiatrist and stuck in therapy. She thought I was lying too, and was always ‘trying to get to the bottom of the issue.’

The wounds didn’t stop there. It was mostly when I was alone, but not always. More often than not, I was tripped by invisible forces right in front of my peers, or my hair was pulled painfully, making me shout out so that my nanny thought I was vying for attention.

One can only imagine the terror I felt. I was only six, I had just lost my mother, my best friend and only defendant, and some invisible force was hurting me constantly, making fun of me, embarrassing me.

No one would believe the true story—that I wasn’t doing it to myself. I was desperate to stop it, to do anything and everything they asked me to do, because they were grownups. I thought then, as a young child, that they
knew
better. Adults knew everything, and surely they knew how to stop me from being hurt. I took the pills, the medications, the therapy, all without question, thinking that
this one, this one
, maybe
this one
would finally help me.

At ten years old I was pulled out of school, considered a danger to others, and confined to my bitterly lonesome old mansion with only nurses and caretakers for company. At eleven, when I woke up screaming, shoving off the invisible
thing
hurting me, I overdosed on my medications, begging it to
stop, stop, please just stopstopstop.
I was rushed to the hospital and had to have my stomach pumped but lived through the experience. I only realized afterward that the adults could only be wrong. That taking pills, any kind of pill and in whatever amount, wouldn’t stop
them
.

I was stripped of any freedoms and liberties I may have had before, and had to be under constant supervision. But somehow, it just got worse. The deeper I sank into despair, the worse it became. I lost weight, became a bruised and beaten skeleton. It took only a moment when the nurse’s back was turned and
they
would strike.

Sometimes it was just one, and I could feel it’s hot breath panting in my ear before it struck me so hard in the stomach that I lost my breath. Other times there were more and I could hear
them
, hear their quiet squeaks and growls as they argued with one another, clawing me savagely. I was like a puppet and they controlled my strings. Nowhere was safe.

And then, just as suddenly, somewhere was safe. Three years later, my longest-lasting nurse, the redoubtable Mrs. Turner, had come into my life and she came from sturdy, Irish Catholic stock. She’d promised my father there was no getting rid of her, no matter what I did to her or myself,
if
he could have mass said in the private chapel in our house three times a week. Thanks to my father’s money, influence, and power, it was an easy deal to strike. Having no one else to watch me, I was pulled to mass and many extra trips for prayer as well.

I couldn’t ever remember being in the chapel before Mrs. Turner arrived. My mother had never gone in there and I’d rarely seen my father at all, even when she was alive. After her death, I was lucky to see him once a year. He was certainly never what one would call a devoutly religious man. I’d always felt vaguely ill whenever we crossed the threshold into that old, Gothic-style room. My stomach hurt, my head ached and it was hard to think clearly or make words focus on a page. But as soon as I’d entered that room, my attackers were nowhere to be found. That first day I spent a whole hour there, completely untouched.