Sun Kissed (The Guardian Angel Series Book 2) (19 page)

I was awoken from my peaceful slumber by a
few light knocks on my door.
Ugh
. Who the hell would be knocking on my
door at this hour? As I began to deliberate whether to answer it or not, my
alarm went off and the realization hit me. It was time to train.

I hate being woken up so early in the
morning. I guess it was worth it, though. With a tired groan, I forced myself
out of bed, stumbling over to the door. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I opened
the door and was greeted by Eli’s serious face.

“Are you ready?”

“No.” I yawned. “I’ll get dressed.”

“Not a chance. Put your shoes on.”

“Eli, I need to get changed.”

“You should have set your alarm earlier.”

“I assumed you would be lenient. C’mon,
it’s my first day. I've only had a few hours’ sleep. Why do we have to start
training now? Let me go back to bed,” I whined.

Eli smiled sideways at me. “I’m going to be
far from lenient with you.”

I sighed in defeat. It was too early to
fight him.

By the door were my joggers, so I pulled
them on. Eli grabbed me by my wrist, pulling me from my room. My vision was a
blur as sleep still nagged at my eyes. It wasn’t until the warm morning sun
welcomed my face that I knew we’d made it outside. I rubbed my eyes and
squinted at my surroundings. A beautiful garden full of colorful flowers of
every hue swayed gently in the breeze before me. I inhaled the sweet scent of
jasmine.

“What is this?” I gasped.

“The backyard.”

I descended the few steps and my feet hit
the perfectly mowed grass. Everything was planned out so beautifully. Eli
walked past me. I followed him along the concrete path and through the garden
until we reached a huge clearing outside the castle’s main walls. Even though I
was no longer surrounded by the breathtaking garden, a strange citrus smell still
lingered in my nostrils.

The wild greenery that surrounded us
outside the castle walls was depressing. The way they curled and twisted,
fighting each other for a glimpse of sunlight. Most fought their way toward the
beautiful garden but appeared to be cut back every time they breached the wall.

“If we’re going to do this, you need to pay
attention.”

My eyes and attention reverted back to Eli.

“Right. Sorry,” I apologized sheepishly.

Eli had already set up a small training
area in a small courtyard at the back of the house. The walls were rubble
mostly, but a few slabs of rock remained. My eyes skimmed over the barbells,
dumbbells, dummies and other things.

Eli pulled off his shirt and I couldn’t
help but stare. When he kept the tank top he wore under his shirt on, I fought
back a disappointed pout.

“Ready?”

“I guess.” I sighed.

“Then let’s begin.”

Training was way more brutal than I thought
it would be. First we started off with stretches and then a quick jog around
the castle. By the time we made it back to where we started, I was dying. Sweat
was pouring profusely down my face and my breathing came out in heavy gasps.

“Please.” I breathed, wiping sweat from my
forehead. “Please, say we’re finished.”

Eli laughed and handed me a bottle of
water. I envied him, he had a few small sweat beads on his forehead, but his
breathing was normal and his skin tone stayed a warm tan, unlike my overheated
pink.

“Yes, we’re finished.”

Immediately I felt myself perk up. I
thought about having a nice cold shower and then going back to bed.

“We’re finished warming up.”

My excitement drained out of me. “You’re
joking.”

He shook his head, his eyes lit up with a
humorous gleam. He pointed over to the weight set.

“Weights.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh I’m dead serious.”

“We’ll start you off on five kilo bicep
curls and seven kilo bench press, just to see how you go.”

“I’m not doing that, Eli. I’m not weak. I’ve
staked a vampire before, you know.”

Eli grabbed a long wooden stake from his
sports bag and brought the dummy to an upright position. His face was tense as
he handed me the stake.

“Do it, then.”

I threw my water bottle on the ground. I
was determined to show him I could do it. My long fingers wrapped around the
stake, pulling it from his hand. I walked up to the practice dummy and shoved
the wood through its chest, but it barely went in. In fact, when I let go, it
stuck in for a little while but then fell to the ground. I glanced at Eli, who
was watching in an I-told-you-so kind of way.

“Again,” he called.

I picked up the stake and tried again, but
this time it didn’t go in as far as my first attempt.

“Again.”

A frustrated growl escaped my throat as I
slammed the wood as hard as I could into the hard, jelly-like surface of the
dummy.

“I staked Hank, why isn’t it working on
this silicon dummy?” I shouted, punching it in the chest.

“Because you’re not strong enough. With
Hank, you got lucky. If I hadn’t driven him onto the stake as you connected
with his flesh, you wouldn’t have been able to pierce his heart.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying I
can’t do this?”

“You can do this, you just need to train.”

“So the point of this session was to make
fun of how pathetic and weak I am?”

“No. The point of this session was to show
you that you need to train, that you’re not as invincible as you think.”

I dropped my eyes from his face to my
shoes. “I get it.”

“This session,” he continued, “was also to
show you how strong you are. Despite where you are and what’s going on around
you, you got out of bed this morning… and that makes you the strongest person I
know.”

“Just not in the physical sense?”

“Right.”

I dropped onto the ground and laid down. I
ignored the way the spiky grass made my skin itch.

Eli towered over me, looking down into my
eyes. “But you can become strong.”

“I don’t want to be strong, Eli. I don’t
want to fight vampires.”

“I know.” Eli laid down next to me and we
watched the sky through the gaps in the tree leaves.

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Train and fight vampires?”

“It’s all I’ve ever known, really. My
father was very strict on me. I trained twice a day, three if I slacked off in
any session.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It wasn’t so bad. It made me strong. I
killed my first vampire when I was fourteen, but he wasn’t alive to see that.”

I tried to picture Eli as an innocent,
young teenager taking on a vampire. It would have been traumatizing. I wrapped
my fingers around his.

“How come you aren’t as anti-vampire as
your dad was?”

“My mind won’t let me. I can’t condemn
someone based on what they are. My dad tried to fix me but he couldn’t, and
that’s why I was such a disappointment to him.”

“Fix you? You’re not broken …”

“To him I was.”

Eli closed his eyes and his chest rose and
fell.

“I wish I could be as calm and as forgiving
as you,” I admitted.

“It’s not without effort.” He rolled over
and rested his head on his hand. “You’re talking about Hunter though.”

I was? I hadn’t intended to, but I guess
that’s what I was referring to with my comment.

“I just can’t stand being near him. It
freaks me out.”

Eli rose to his feet and extended his arm
to me. “Do whatever makes you comfortable but remember he was your friend. He
was there for you when I left, when you had no one else. He’s probably feeling
just as alone as you were, if not worse.”

I stared at the ground. Eli was right, he
was there for me, but since his transformation I’d been so horrible to him. A
warm index finger ran along my jaw line, tilting my face upwards and forcing
eye contact.

“Don’t forget that although he’s a friend,
he’s still dangerous, Ruby. You’re a goddess and a Heelian, both are
irresistible to a vampire … be careful.”

I nodded, but Eli didn’t remove his finger
from my face. Instead he surveyed my lips and my eyes.

“A penny for your thoughts?” I asked, using
his line on him.

His lips curved into a slight smile and he
bit his bottom lip in an attempt to hide it. God I love it when he does that.

“In my day it was customary to ask the
father for permission before you court his daughter.” Our attention flicked
toward the opening to the castle back gardens and a skinny, old man was leaning
against a weathered wall.

“Dad?”

The old man took a few steps toward us.
They said he was addicted to vampire bites but he looked normal to me. I
pictured him skinny with wrinkly, sun-deprived skin. I imagined him all hunched
and sickly, like the woman in my cell when I first arrived at Sage Sanctum.

“Your prolonged absence means you forfeited
that right a long time ago,” Eli stated.

My eyes didn’t stray from the man that
looked too much like me. Our facial structure was the same, from the high cheek
bones and blue eyes down to the full lips and long legs. Mithras’s long dark
hair was tied into a ponytail at the base of his neck.

“Ahh, little Eli. You’re all grown up, I
see.”

They knew each other? How did Eli know my
father when I’d never even met him?

“Perhaps you could give my daughter and I
some privacy?”

“Not going to happen,” Eli growled
defensively.

“If you have to say something to me, then
you can say it in front of my guardian angel.”

“Oh goody,” he mumbled sarcastically. “Lucian
wants me to train you on how to control your sun power.”

Eli’s jaw clenched. He didn’t like that
idea any more than I did.

“No thanks. I’d much rather fight a vampire
with my bare hands or use my elements.”

Mithras chuckled. “Stubborn, just like your
mother.”

He took a few steps closer and Eli stood
slightly in front of me, shielding me from the stranger that was my father.

Ugh. What did my mother see in him? I’d
known him barely five minutes and I could already say he was ignorant, cocky,
and bossy.

“I don’t think it wise to come between me
and my daughter, Mr De Luca.”

“He’s already told you that you forfeited
any parenting rights a long time ago,” I stated dully.

His hands began to glow. What was he up to?
He pushed his hands towards Eli and a blinding light shot out from his palms. I
felt Eli tense as he braced himself for the impact. I didn’t know what would
happen to Eli but I wasn’t going to risk it. I dove in front of him and the
light hit me instead. At first it burned and a scream tore free, but when the
initial burn was over, my body welcomed the rest, absorbing it like a plant
absorbs water.

“Ruby!”

Blinking, I focused on Eli’s face. He was
leaning toward me, his hands gripping my shoulders

“Are you okay?”

“I — I’m fine.”

My eyes flicked over to where Mithras had
been standing. He was gone. Slowly my vision began to falter. The sharp lines
of the world began to blur.

“What’s happening?” I groaned.

Two strong arms wrapped around me but it
wasn’t enough to pull me away from the approaching darkness.

Possessive and Jealous

My head was pounding hard against my skull
before I even opened my eyes. When I did, shapes and colors blurred around me.
I squinted and slowly things became clearer. I was in a strange room. My eyes
focused on a big painting. Immediately I recognized it as one of the Latvian
ones Eli had in the living room of his house at Sage. The only place I had seen
those types of paintings here was in the sitting room.

“Where am I?” I moaned.

“Wakey, wakey. You’re in the sitting room.”
The cold, empty voice flowed through me, chilling my spine and sending a shiver
down it.

“Ruby, are you all right?”

A blurry face loomed over me. I blinked a
few times and the blurry lines became visible. Dirty blonde hair dangled just
above my face. It was the witch girl.

“I- I think so,” I mumbled, sitting up. Her
hand rested on my shoulder, preventing me from sitting up fully.

“You need to lie down.”

“Where’s Eli?” I asked.

“He’s upstairs. I heard that you met your
father. He’s something else, isn’t he?” Lucian laughed.