The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) (25 page)

             
“Did they?” Adeline asked.

             
Serena nodded. “Twice during that whole time. Once was at night, when we were asleep. They got two of us before we fended them off. The other time was in the afternoon, when we were pulling back for the day. They came out…insane. They fought with all the madness and fury of demons, ripping and clawing, until we’d done away with every last one of the attackers.” Serena’s voice was haunted, her eyes glazed. Adeline was in the kitchen, placing tea leaves in a pot, but stopped when she heard her friend’s voice fade. She ignored the tea and went to sit on a loveseat, nearer for support. “We received orders to retreat the day afterwards. When we were done, we’d killed nearly a hundred of them. I remember looking back at the tatters of the island, the wreckage it had become, and thinking that the sand was more red than white.”

             
Adeline’s face was passive. She didn’t shrink back from the gruesome imagery. Callie went to sit on the other loveseat, feeling the sadness and the uncertainty which plagued the room.

             
“We have to stop him, Serena,” Adeline said.

             
“I know,” Serena replied.

             
“We just need to figure out a plan,” she went on.

             
She would have said more, but at that moment, a rustle of leaves sounded, and Alex appeared in the doorframe. Adeline stood at once. Serena relaxed backwards, uninterested.

             
“Alex,” Adeline said with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

             
Alex didn’t meet her eye at first. He looked at the ground, and Callie saw that he was struggling with himself. He seemed so out of place there, so at a loss for that confidence she’d seen on the beach.

             
“Emeric is wrong,” he said finally. His voice was hard, as though he had choked on the words as he’d spoken them.

             
“Finally, the student goes against the master,” Serena said, examining her cuticles. “About time.”

             
“Hush, Serena,” Adeline scolded her. She turned back to Alex, who appeared to be torn between staying and leaving. Adeline sighed, her shoulders dropping as they lost the tension they had born, and she seemed affected by the way he struggled. “Come in,” she said, reaching out and taking him by the arm. “Serena and I were just discussing this.”

             
She led him to the opposite chair, and Callie hopped out just in time for him to take her place. Adeline returned to her own seat then, and her eyes were narrowed in concentration. “What are the Sirens trying to accomplish by threatening war, as Emeric says? Surely they are wise enough that if they really
did
want war, they would not warn him about their attack. They must be attempting to achieve something else.”

             
“Like what?” Serena asked, her head rolling to the side so that she was looking at Adeline. “Why can’t they just be morons? If they told Emeric that they would attack us soon, then obviously they knew he would retaliate somehow. So, what? They
want
us to strike first?”

             
“No, of course not, but I think—“

             
“Why not?” Alex asked, cutting in. “If we strike first, they would have the advantage of having the battle on their own territory. They could be preparing for such action as we speak.”

             
“Impossible,” Serena argued. “They know how it ended last time. They would not risk such bloodshed again.”

             
“Unless they were certain of a victory,” Alex reasoned. “After all, their numbers are larger now than they were the last time we attacked. And their island is much changed; the terrain has grown coarser, more difficult to maneuver. They may have been prompting Emeric to begin such a battle, in order to have him send a troop of protectors to attack them. If they killed his soldiers, then flying to the canopy and killing the untrained Guardians would be simple enough.”

             
Adeline and Serena sat in silence, considering this fact.

             
“It is logical enough,” Adeline pointed out.

             
“But it would be such a risk on their part. We cannot be sure it is their strategy,” Serena said.

             
“The idea may be enough to convince Emeric not to send the soldiers. He may choose to wait and strategize more,” Alex said.

             
Adeline frowned, and shook her head. “No. It wouldn’t be enough. Emeric won’t back down without an alternative solution to back into. We need to come up with something to stall him, to reason with him. He will not simply abandon battle plans when there is a threat on the horizon.”

             
“So what is your proposition?” Alex asked.

             
“I don’t have one yet,” Adeline said, her face growing severe. “But I’ll think of one.”

             
The last thing Callie saw, before being pulled out of that place, was the subtle, slight confusion on Alex’s face as he looked at Adeline. It bore the mark of surprise. And admiration.

             
As happened before, Callie felt the floor go slack. She was tugged forward like a marionette, a string that wasn’t there pulling her from the center of her chest. The scene revolved quickly, catching Callie in a tornado of color, and then slowed, and stopped, and stood still.

             
She found herself at the base of a tree, standing on the dirt. She looked around at the tangle of tree trunks and fallen leaves, trying to make sense of where she was. She’d never seen the forest floor from the inside like this; it was like a maze, an endless expanse of senseless foliage. Fog clung to the ground like black mist, throwing shadows over everything in its path. The sounds of forest animals drifted towards her, seeming to get closer as the seconds passed. She felt her palms slicken. The scene was more than a little eerie, and she couldn’t see anyone else around.

             
She backed up a few steps, unsure how to navigate this new place. As she ducked below the branches, a leg swung down over the side of a tree branch, falling right in front of her face, and she gasped, jumping away from it.

             
Callie looked up, and saw that it was Serena, leaning against the trunk, swinging her legs over the branches. She hummed a tune while leaves fell around her, and Callie’s tunnel of vision honed in on the tree branch a few feet above Serena, the one on which Alex and Adeline sat.

             
She heard them speaking to each other in vague words, the distance blurring the sounds until Callie couldn’t understand what they were saying. She frowned, and looked around for another tree branch.

             
But there was no other branch close enough to the ground that Callie could reach it. The only one that she could grab onto, in fact, was the one that Serena was perched upon. Timidly, she reached up and took hold of the bark, careful not to get too close to Serena. She clutched the branch and, utilizing muscles that hadn’t been exercised since gym class two weeks ago, she pulled herself up to a seated position atop the bark.

             
She was sitting next to Serena now, and saw that Serena was braiding a lock of her hair, humming the chords of some ancient song. Callie looked up, and saw a branch only a foot or two above her head. It was a little to the right, and so when she stood up, she had to reach outwards in order to lean on it. She was standing like that, pitched forward in a diagonal, half her weight balanced on her feet and the other on her hands, when Serena stretched her arms to either side as she yawned. Suddenly, she swung her leg back onto the tree branch, and Callie gasped as it passed right through her ankles. For a moment, she’d forgotten that the motion wouldn’t actually knock her off of the tree.

             
After a moment, Callie huffed, realizing her mistake. Relief washed through her as she hoisted herself onto the next branch. From there, her path was clear. She saw Alex and Adeline on a branch only ten feet above her, and all that separated Callie from where they sat were three other branches; one was immediately to her left, another was directly above that one, and the last was situated at an odd downward-angle a fair distance away. But she saw that if she could get onto that third one, then she would have no trouble reaching out and grabbing onto the branch which Alex and Adeline sat on.

             
She set her jaw, and sidestepped onto the first branch, catching herself against the trunk of the tree. Reaching up to the second branch was a bit awkward, as it was immediately above her head. She wrapped her hands around it, and then shifted her hips backwards so that she was hanging off of the side of the branch. That way, she was able to pull herself up alongside the second branch, and, with a groan of effort, straddle it.

             
Callie took a moment to catch her breath. She wasn’t used to benching her body weight, and so the activity was a bit exhausting. After a few seconds, she stood up, placing a hand against the trunk, and reached out to see if she could grab onto the third branch. It was just beyond reach, however, too far to the right and a little too high. She could jump, she knew, but the downward angle worried her. The color of the wood was a sickly brown, nearly black, and Callie could tell that it had been rotting for a while. If she jumped, Alex wouldn’t be there to catch her, and the distance to the ground worried her. She didn’t think she could really be killed in a memory; but no one had ever told her it was impossible.

             
She swallowed. The ground seemed incredibly far away, and in the darkness, she couldn’t tell exactly how many branches she’d run into on the way down. The fog was circulating in smoky curls, darkly warning her against what laid below.

             
With a deep breath, she closed her eyes. And when she opened them, she didn’t see any easier solutions. So she ignored the way that her gut lurched as she made up her mind, and crouched down a ways, before leaping, wingless, into the empty air, her arms outstretched, squeezing her eyes shut once more in blind terror.

             
When her hands slapped firmly against bark, though, her eyes snapped open in shock. She quickly tightened her fingers against the fleshy branch, the bark soggy with oozing tree sap. She hung limply from the branch, unsure what to do now. She hadn’t thought this part through. Sitting on the branch was out of the question, as there was no place to sit; the branch itself was hardly hanging on. She saw Adeline and Alex, not three feet from her now, and began to swing her legs back and forth.

             
She inched closer to the branch they sat on with each thrust, before falling backwards again. And then, stealing herself as she came within reaching distance, she shot one hand forwards as though she were still a kid, playing in some high-stakes game of monkey bars, and let go.

             
Almost implausibly, she felt herself latch onto this branch as well. The good luck startled her; she couldn’t believe that she was able to pull herself onto this one, too. But she was, and once she was seated, she found that she was perched beside Adeline, not six inches away, and was able to hear their conversation.

             
Alex’s eyes were hard. Callie recognized the expression. He was arguing with Adeline; she had been the source of that look several times herself. Irrationally, it upset her to see him fighting with someone else.

             
“He’s not going to just
warn
them, Adeline,” Alex said. “This isn’t a traffic violation. He’s talking about mass slaughter—do you think he’d be satisfied if he forwent that? And for mere words, no less?”

             
“Well, I don’t see you offering up any solutions!” she said, throwing up her hands. Her purple eyes blazed. She was leaning against the trunk of the tree, in much the same stance as was Serena, hugging her knees to her chest as she faced Alex. He sat on the branch, his legs hanging over one side, facing outwards and watching the forest.

             
“When I have one worth offering, I’ll tell you,” he promised her. She sighed and slumped back further against the trunk, the angry energy draining from her.

             
“This is impossible,” she moaned.

             
Alex drew a deep breath, and leaned to the side, picking up Adeline’s ankles and pulling them forwards so that her legs were draped across his lap. “We’ll think of something,” he said.

             
Callie noted the way that Adeline’s cheeks flushed red, matching her hair. Callie didn’t think that Adeline was breathing well at that moment; for that matter, neither was Callie. Alex grinned over at her.

             
“If it comes to the worst case scenario, we could always go rogue. Kidnap Emeric, tie him down until he relents,” he said. Adeline chuckled.

             
“Wonderful,” she laughed. “And when we let him loose? He’ll banish us for sure, if not do away with us altogether.”