Guardian Angel (2 page)

Because we were on a mission.

After being deadlocked with the Guardians for more than seven hundred years, the Angels had finally come out on top. Not only were they the single largest psionic faction on the planet, they were the last faction headed by a master controller: a powerful mind controller who could semi-permanently bend people’s loyalties to their cause. And with that power, they were growing ever more powerful as they absorbed scattered, leaderless Guardians and other, lesser psionic factions into their ranks. If left unchecked, the Angels would soon have complete control of not only the psionic world, but of people everywhere.

Ever since I turned psionic, I had a personal stake in this conflict. My first sister, Catherine “Cat” Howell, had been abducted by the Angels when she was just ten years old. Aligning myself with the Guardians, I had made it my personal mission to find her and free her from her enslavement.

But when I was briefly reunited with Cat at the gathering of lesser gods last year, it was at gunpoint. Cat was the one holding the gun, and she called the Angel queen’s nephew, Randal Divine, her father. Cathy Divine, as she called herself now, had found a home among the Angels in the same way that I had found my place with Cindy Gifford and the Guardians, and there was nothing I could do to bring my sister back.

And that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

During the gathering of lesser gods, the Guardians had succeeded in assassinating the Angels’ last known master controller, Queen Larissa Divine, and we all thought the Angels’ conversions would quickly wear off and their faction would fall apart. But that didn’t happen. Soon afterwards, the Guardians’ capital city of New Haven was brought down in a single night by a hoard of newly converted Angels who had been bound to the service of Randal Divine. Despite the conventional understanding that master controllers were always female, Cat’s adoptive father proclaimed himself the Angels’ new “king” – a legendary male master controller that appeared only once every millennium.

The night New Haven fell, Terry, Alia and I fled the city with a crowd of lost children in tow while Cindy Gifford was taken by the Angels along with the rest of the New Haven Council, and we hadn’t seen her since. Taking refuge in the small Guardian settlement of Walnut Lane, Terry and I started giving combat training to the children we had rescued, including James, in the hope that we could use their strength to help get us to the Historian, a 3000-year-old psionic who might be able to tell us the location of Randal Divine. It didn’t work out quite as we planned it, but nevertheless this spring, with the help of some Wolves we rescued from an Angel outpost, we finally made it to the Historian’s mountain.

But when we got there, the Historian taught me just how much the truth could hurt.

Randal wasn’t a psionic king at all. In reality, Cat was the one doing the converting. My own sister was the Angels’ new queen, the female wild-born of a once-lost master-controller bloodline. But not even the Angels knew that. Randal was using his power as a mind-writer to make the new converts believe that he was their master. Cat was still fourteen years old, and Randal Divine, her “loving father,” was protecting her with this outrageous lie until she was old and wise enough to rule the Angels, and later the entire planet.

And so now I had a new mission.

In return for his assistance, the Historian had demanded that I help restore equilibrium to the rapidly deteriorating balance of power between the Guardians and the Angels. He had asked me to put an end to my own bloodline.

It’s a strange world we live in. A world of consequences for both action and inaction. Consider this: If you were to destroy a tyrannical government at the height of its power, you would be forever remembered as a great hero who saved millions from cruelty and oppression, but you could not bring back to life those who had already perished under the tyrant’s rule. If you could somehow kill the same tyrant
before
he came into power, then you would save millions more from a horrible future and no one would have to suffer, but you yourself would be nothing more than a murderer.

I wanted to be neither hero nor villain, but master controllers were the greatest enemies of free will, and by unhappy chance my sister was the world’s last. Catherine Divine and her faction couldn’t be allowed to rule this world. Thus I had promised both the Historian and myself that I would do something absolutely horrible: I would hunt my sister down and kill her.

And it was
because
Cat was my sister that I couldn’t turn away from my mission. There was no way I could let a stranger do this in my stead. As her brother, as her family, I owed it to Cat to end her life myself. I know that’s crazy. You really have to be there to fully understand it.

The day the Historian told me that Cat was the new Angel master, I already knew what I had to do about it. But knowing and accepting are two different things, and five months later, it still gnawed at me. Out of consideration for my feelings, everyone on my team was careful never to refer to Catherine Divine as my sister. Unless we were talking about Alia, “sister” was a taboo word around here. Instead, we called Cat the “Angel master” and the “target.” I was grateful for that, but it didn’t really change who the target was. She was my own flesh and blood, and there was simply no getting around that fact.

Hence the nightmares.

As for the Historian’s precious “equilibrium,” I cared for it only in-so-much as it brought Cindy (who we learned had been converted into an Angel) back to Alia and allowed my part in the faction war to be over once and for all. To that end, I didn’t care how many people we hurt or killed. Over my years as a psionic destroyer, I had crossed many lines, and I was used to it by now.

All summer long, we had been moving from hidden Guardian settlement to god-forsaken hidden Guardian settlement, some places just a tiny collection of psionics living in fear of capture and conversion. Though the Historian had given us the true identity of the Angels’ last master controller, he knew nothing of her location. At the Historian’s suggestion, we were asking the leaders and elders of the scattered Guardian groups for any and all information that might lead us to the Divines.

But it wasn’t easy gathering information. No one yet knew that Catherine was the new master of the Angels. Daddy Divine was still parading himself as a psionic king, and would do so for as long as he could. The Guardians believed him too, and we couldn’t tell anyone the truth without revealing that I had master controller in my blood. At the present, the only people alive who knew my family secret were Randal, Catherine, the Historian and my team. Eight people. We wanted to keep it that way, as there was no telling what would happen if this got out. Thus it was with carefully guised hints and roundabout questions that we dealt with the remnants of our own faction. Everywhere we went, we were given much sympathy, but little help.

Still, in all this time, we had been extremely fortunate in that we hadn’t been waylaid by Angels. We were constantly on guard, but so far no contact. At least, not unless you counted the pair that we accidentally ran into several weeks ago. But they weren’t even Seraphim, and Ed Regis shot them both before they could get away and report our location to their master. All I remember of that encounter is how impressed I was, once again, with Ed Regis’s skills. And also how entirely emotionless I had been when we disposed of the bodies. I sort of wished that I could feel bad about what we did, but I didn’t. I knew that the pair of Angels could have been victims themselves, their minds converted against their wills, unable to keep themselves from serving Randal and Catherine’s twisted cause. But that didn’t change the fact that if we hadn’t killed them, our lives, and more importantly, our mission, would have been compromised. We did what we had to. There was no shame in it.

The only thing that really bothered me about our run-in with those Angels was that they recognized me. Not that I was a particularly inconspicuous person, but apparently my name and face were now known to more than just the Seraphim. When he discovered that I had returned from the Historian’s mountain still breathing, Randal Divine had put a price on my head. And it wasn’t for me “dead or alive.” It was specifically for my capture. Alive. That’s what really scared me.

Though only females could become master controllers, the potential for this power was passed exclusively down the male side of the family. That meant that Catherine’s future daughters would never become master controllers, but mine could. In fact, according to the Historian, I was the world’s last male psionic capable of passing the power of master controllers on to the next generation. Thus Randal Divine wanted me alive, turned Angel… for
breeding purposes.

But in order to keep his own secret safe, Randal couldn’t allow anyone, not even his own people, to learn what I was, so his bounty on me didn’t detail the true reason he wanted me brought to him in one piece. Nor was I the only one on Randal’s most wanted list since there were still plenty of other important Guardians at large. But as my infamy grew, I feared that it would only be a matter of time before someone figured it out.

“Addy,”
said Alia, breaking into my thoughts,
“is there any more chocolate milk?”

“I could go make some,” I replied, and then asked with a grin, “Do you want it in your mouth or down your shirt?”

“Could you hold the wheel so I can go change?”

“Sure.”

“And shower.”

“Make it quick.”

Alia disappeared into the back. Too lazy to switch seats, I telekinetically held on to the steering wheel, keeping us steady.

I could hear Ed Regis and Terry talking in the lounge space behind me. James had woken up and joined the conversation too. They were discussing our next destination: yet another breakaway Guardian settlement. But this one was very special to us. Though recently renamed the Wood-claw Guardians, they were none other than the former residents of Walnut Lane, led by Mrs. Harding.

We had visited thirteen Guardian settlements already, staying with them for anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, trading what little information we had for whatever they were willing to offer. So far, however, we had no real leads on Randal Divine. These scattered Guardians were, for the most part, simply trying to survive, and weren’t actively fighting the Angels anymore.

However, we did hear several rumors from them about an underground resistance network hidden within the former Guardian city of New Haven – now occupied by the Angels and renamed Lumina. If such a resistance movement really existed, then we wanted to be a part of it. The Historian’s only advice to me regarding how to find Randal Divine was to get that information from people who were “closer to this war,” as he put it. Guardians in Lumina would certainly be a step in the right direction. But no one we had talked to so far could confirm these rumors or help us make contact.

Not that we were expecting someone to simply give us Randal Divine’s home address, but our utter lack of progress over the past months was frustrating, especially for Terry. With each fruitless visit, Terry pressed us harder toward her alternate plan, which was to attack an Angel outpost and gather information directly from the Angels. Ed Regis and I were skeptical about the merits of this approach. For starters, it was downright dangerous. Most psionic settlements would be much too large to take down with only five people, even with people like Terry and Ed Regis. Furthermore, the Angels themselves had just about as much chance as the Guardians did of knowing where King Randal Divine lived. Only the very top Seraphim, members of Randal Divine’s personal guard, would have that information. We would have to identify one, capture, and finally extract Randal’s whereabouts from him. Not an easy task even with Guardian support, and impossible without it. But Terry insisted that we might get lucky, and anything was better than just driving around. The pair of Angels that we had bumped into last month would have gotten away had Ed Regis not shot them, but Terry was furious that we didn’t get them alive.

Then, on our thirteenth stop – just a single house shared by three psionic families – we finally got a lucky break. Their leader knew the location of Mrs. Harding’s Wood-claw settlement. Back when we parted with Harding’s faction in Walnut Lane, we all knew that there was a fair chance we would be caught by the Angels before reaching the Historian. Thus Mrs. Harding hadn’t told us where she was planning to relocate to, and we knew better than to ask. Mrs. Harding was a master at keeping her people hidden, and we had spent much of the summer wondering if we would ever see our refugee kids again. Now, finally, we had found them.

Our visit to Mrs. Harding’s had multiple purposes. Even if we were going to go with Terry’s plan, we would still have to pick our fights carefully. Old Mrs. Harding, with her years of experience leading her breakaway faction, could probably supply us with some useful information. She might even know something about the Guardian Resistance in Lumina. We also needed reinforcements. We desperately needed a hider and finder if we were going to do anything covert against a psionic settlement. If Mrs. Harding was unwilling to part with her own Knights, we hoped to at least take back some of the kids that we had rescued from New Haven, especially the hider, Rachael Adams. Lastly, we needed to retrieve the Wolves’ psionic database that I had left in Scott’s care before heading to the Historian. As incomplete and outdated as it was, this database would still come in handy when dealing with our target Angels.

But my personal best reason for visiting the Wood-claw Guardians was that I could see Candace again. I’m sure my sister felt the same way about Patrick and baby Laila.

We were now only half a day’s drive away from the city where Wood-claw was hidden, and Ed Regis was planning out a safe approach. Aside from the name of the city, nobody knew the exact location of the settlement. It was protected by hiding fields which kept potential aggressors from sensing Wood-claw’s psionic population from afar. Once inside the city, we would have to wait for the Wood-claw finders to locate us by homing in on Alia’s and my psionic powers. There was no guarantee, however, that other psionic factions, namely Angels, wouldn’t find us first. That was what Ed Regis wanted to go over with Terry. Those two were the real soldiers among us, so they were our leaders. Unlike James, I didn’t concern myself with the details. Whatever they decided would be fine.