The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) (27 page)

             
But they weren’t listening. She rolled her eyes and shook her head just as the bedroom door closed behind them. “As if I actually told anyone!” she called after them. She waited a beat, her head cocked towards the door as she listened. Finally, she yelled, “
Your welcome
!”

And still they didn’t answer.
She sighed and finished zipping her purse, then walked to the door. At the last minute, she froze, doubled back, and dug a scarf out from under a sofa cushion. Callie frowned, unsure why this memory was continuing. Was Serena purposefully making it drag on, hinting at what was going on beyond that door? She felt her heart sink a little.

             
So this was what Shay had meant when she’d said that Adeline had been important to him. She thought that she might have already known, really. But then why was her stomach twisting with jealousy?

             
Serena fished out the scarf, and walked to the door again. But before she could jump, a resounding crash came from the back room. Her head snapped towards the door as a low, dreadful moan came out from behind it.

             
“Adeline?” she asked, walking towards the back room.

             
But before she’d even gotten to the threshold, Alex opened the door, his face etched with horror. Serena began to sprint. “What is it?” she asked.

             
And then she froze in the doorway, her hands braced on either side. She gasped as she looked into the room. Callie walked over to her, and peeked over her shoulder.

             
Adeline was on the floor, hunched in the fetal position, her hands raking over her face and hair in furious repetition. She was keening, soft and heartbroken, “No, no.”

             
And that was when Callie saw it. She hadn’t seen it before because Adeline’s wings had been folded. But now they were stretched out to either side of her, and Callie saw it clearly. The faint but clear traces of silver outlining the inside of Adeline’s feathers.

Chapter
Fourteen

Falling

             
When Callie opene
d
her eyes, she was in Serena’s cottage again. She blinked and looked around. Serena was in front of her, leaning backwards against the counter, her arms crossed over her chest. She stared at Callie with some sort of emotion. It wasn’t anger, exactly. Nor was it annoyance. It was almost sadness, though the kind of sadness which produces ferocity rather than vulnerability.

             
Callie took a step away from her, and looked over her shoulder. Shay was sitting in a chair, reading one of Serena’s novels. It struck Callie as odd that, as she’d been bearing witness to such emotional transformation and turmoil, Shay had been performing such an everyday task.

             
She looked back at Serena. She didn’t know quite how to process the avalanche of emotions raining down upon her now. She was heartbroken and furious, jealous and repulsed, all at once. But she had a question that took precedence.

             
“What happened next?” she asked, almost afraid to know.

             
“You know what happened,” Serena said. “You’ve seen her on that island.”

             
“No…I mean, what happened immediately after that. How does the story end?” Callie asked. She felt like it had cut off too abruptly, like Serena didn’t want her to see what happened after the climax.

             
Serena lifted her chin. “Once word got out about her condition, people started to whisper that she had only come up with the plan because she had known. They claimed that she’d been aware of her evolution the entire time, and she had only been trying to save herself. The position of liaison became a joke. No one wanted it; they thought it was a traitorous position.”

             
“No one except you,” Callie said, remembering the comment that Serena had made to Emeric that first day Callie had met her, about being liaison to the Sirens.

             
“Except me,” Serena agreed.

             
“Is it true?” Callie asked. “Did she know the whole time?”

             
Serena shrugged, looking away, as though she didn’t care. But the fact that she refused to meet Callie’s eyes told Callie that she was struggling with the memory. Callie turned to Shay.

             
Shay shook her head. “It is hard to tell,” she replied. “Everyone evolves at different rates. It is possible that Adeline only began to evolve that day, that she simply did so much more quickly than others. Or, it is possible that she didn’t know she was evolving. Sometimes one does not see the silver in her own feathers.”

             
“What did she say?” Callie asked, turning back to Serena.

             
Serena refused to meet her eye. She ground out, “She said she’d known the whole time. She said that it was the only reason she’d
seduced
Alex, because she knew he had pull with Emeric, and she wanted him to convince Emeric to let her stay.” Serena shook her head furiously, and looked up at Callie. Callie was startled at the look of denial in Serena’s eyes. “But she knew the rules. She knew she couldn’t stay. And the thing is, she didn’t even try that hard
to
stay. We wanted to fight to keep her here; but it was like she wanted to go.”

             
“Once she was sure that she would be kept alive,” Shay pointed out.

             
“But what about the call, Shay? She didn’t even make the call until later that same day,” Serena bit off.

             
“Sometimes Sirens go days before they make their first call. Even after we detect the feather change, we sometimes must wait until she makes the call in order for a Siren to hear her and to come for her,” Shay reasoned.

             
“That’s
bullshit
!” Serena cried. “You said it yourself—either she developed quickly or she’d known for days. But if she developed quickly, then she would have had to make the call more quickly, and so the timing fits if she’d made the call that same day. If she’d known for days, then she would have made the call earlier.”

             
“Not necessarily,” Shay said.

             
Serena shook her head again, blinking furiously, and turned away from them, bracing herself against the counter.

             
After a moment, Callie asked quietly, “But why did she tell people that she’d known?”

             
Serena laughed bitterly. “You don’t want to know, human.”

             
Callie’s mind was beginning to spin, her anger pushing to the front of her mind. “It was because of Alex, wasn’t it?” she asked, knowing what he would have done to protect someone he loved. “When you say you guys fought to keep her here…it was him, wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to let her go.”

             
Serena sniffed and whipped around, jerking a wrist across her cheek. “No, he wasn’t. At least, not at first,” she spat. “There, does that make you feel better? She gave herself up, betrayed
me
, so that he wouldn’t go and get himself banished. She figured if she made a joke of him, he’d stay. And guess what?” she asked, stepping forward, her ice blue eyes connecting mockingly with Callie’s as she stood right in front of her. “He did.” She smiled with such pity that Callie felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. “Some great guy you’ve got there, little girl. He just let her go. He made a pathetic attempt to let her stay, making himself the picture of nobility, and then he did nothing to stop her from leaving once things got messy.”

             
Callie bore the harsh words in silence, though she felt her own tears rise to the pits of her eyes. That wasn’t the Alex she knew. As much as she hated that he’d been in love with Adeline, she knew that he wouldn’t simply let her leave without doing everything to make her stay.

             
“Shay,” Callie said, her voice faltering. “We need to leave.”

             
Shay was at her side within the space of a breath, and Serena laughed again. “You, too, huh? You leave when you don’t like what you see?” She walked away, into the kitchen. “I take it all back. You two deserve each other.”

             
“Shay, now,” Callie said, and felt a small pair of arms gently lift her from where she stood. As they flew out of the door, Callie heard the crippling smash of glass being thrown against the wall. She barely flinched.

              Callie had been intent upon going back to Shay’s house to sort out her thoughts. But then, as they flew in that direction, Callie realized that all she would do for the next few hours would be think about what Serena had said. She would make herself sick over it. And she knew that she had only gotten half of the story.

             
So she told Shay to drop her off at Alex’s house. She figured that she would ask him if what Serena had said was true, he would give her another version of the past—one that made sense, hopefully—and she could lose the awful, sickly feeling which plagued her stomach.             

             
Shay looked at her dubiously. The woman knew that Callie was clinging to a desperate hope, one which would paint Alex in a better light. And Callie
knew that such hope was never something which rational people relied on. But she felt too jittery to think rationally; the hard picture which Serena had drawn haunted her. And those words that she’d said—“You leave when you don’t like what you see”—those were really beginning to piss her off.

             
Shay left her on Alex’s doorstep. She offered to wait, to bring Callie home, but Callie shook her head. Shay had already waited around long enough for one day. And besides, whatever Alex had to say, she didn’t want him editing himself for Shay’s sake. So she told the Healer that she’d have Alex take her home later, that she should go back to the cottage by herself.

             
“Alex?” Callie asked, walking into his cottage. She’d been surprised on the way to his house; it wasn’t all that far from Shay’s. From what Callie could tell, based on the map of the forest she’d drawn up in her mind’s eye, Alex’s house was only a little north from Shay’s house. It was right between the Healer’s cottage and Emeric’s.

             
But now, as Callie stepped into the living room, she was even more surprised to see the inside. She paused for a moment, her anger masked by shock. She didn’t know what she had expected—animal rugs, maybe. Or movie posters. Magazines peeking out from underneath the couch. But this was nothing like she could have guessed; it was spacious and comfortable. The far wall, instead of being made up of wooden planks interrupted by the meager square of a window, was almost not a wall at all. Huge French doors dominated, at least six of them lining the entire expanse, which were now pushed outwards. The open doors led out to a long, narrow wooden deck, unfenced by rails, which wrapped around the back of the house. The breeze drifting in through the doors caused the gauzy floor-length curtains to ripple and sway in ribbons of white mesh, catching Callie in their hypnotic flow. As the sun set to the west, the orange lighting which filtered into the room flooded the space in a cozy afternoon glow.

             
Further to the right, where the doors ended, the adjacent wooden wall led into a kitchen made up of warm amber tints and mahogany accents, the cabinets built of puckering coral glass, the counters of rich marble. The stools on the near side of the counter were crafted of dark cherry wood. Everything gleamed and shone, organized and clean and inviting.

             
Closer to Callie, the living room caught her attention. The hardwood floor posed as a thick frame around the smooth cream carpet, below the low-seated glass coffee table. Around the coffee table sat a black suede three-piece sofa, which formed a semi-circle that opened to face the fireplace. The mantle itself was constructed of artfully cracked pale brick, the black scroll hearth screen below curling up towards it.

             
There were no pictures on the walls, no plants blooming from the corners. The entire room was set up to make one feel comfortable; it was clean and well-kept. But there was no life to it. It was a picture of perfection, belonging to magazines and movie sets. It wasn’t a home.

             
Callie shook her head, ridding herself of the surprised sensation. “Alex!” she called again, taking another step into the house.