Whimper

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.

Copyright © Erin McFadden 2015

Editor Todd Barselow
www.toddedits.com

Cover by Paragraphic Designs

Formatting by Felicia Tatum Books

ISBN-13: 978-1512353723

ISBN-10: 151235323

For my girls,

You inspire me daily to dream of fantastical things.

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MUSE

The Brotherhood of the Guardians has existed for thousands of years to serve a single purpose: the protection of Talents, the mortal descendants of the original nine Muses.

Twenty-one year-old Daniel Lyoncourt has trained his entire life to join the Guardians. Daniel is prepared to risk his life in order to keep his Talent safe, but when he's assigned to nineteen year-old Anna Saint-James, he discovers that his life isn't the only thing he could lose. Anna has no idea how special she is and knows nothing about her abilities. He must teach her to control her gifts, keep her safe, and hope that he can find a place in her life as something more than just her bodyguard.

All power comes at a price. Like all Talents, Anna must one day make a choice: lose all of her powers, or ascend to a higher plane, leaving behind everyone she loves.

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This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot “The Hollow Men”

I jolted awake, fighting the sheets tangled around my legs. My ears strained to hear the sound that startled me out of the first decent rest I’d had in days. At first, all I could hear were the crickets quietly chirping far down on the lawn. Then, an eerie wail drifted on the breeze. Goosebumps prickled my skin, but I slipped out of bed and stalked over to the small open window in my bedroom to investigate. Pushing aside my pale lavender curtains, I squinted, trying to make out shapes with only the pale light of the moon. Another moaning wail jerked my attention to the far corner of the yard.

Finally, I saw her. The moonlight painted her with a faint blue glow. Her cascading blonde hair clung damply to her face, her dress was torn, and she tottered unevenly on a single kitten heel. The other shoe dangled from her limp right hand as she stumbled through my rhododendrons. Staggering, she bumped into our concrete bird bath, screeched, and started towards the back stairs leading up to our wrap-around porch. Right. Soooo not going to happen. I jabbed a button on the chunky control box mounted next to my window, starting a grinding noise downstairs as the three sets of wrought iron steps leading to our elevated porch slowly folded themselves up.

The noise caught the girl’s attention, and her stumbling gait picked up speed. She managed to reach the edge of the porch as the steps slammed home, far out of her reach.

“Hey! This isn’t your house! Follow the edge of the porch around to the street and stumble your drunk ass back to Sorority Row. Your flock is probably looking for you!” I yelled through my window screen.

Stupid drunk sorority and fraternity sheep have been stumbling through this yard my entire life. My uncle never put up a fence no matter how many times I’d begged him to. As a local bar owner, he didn’t want to risk having one of his best patrons impale him or herself on a fence picket. Crazy Grandpa McGuire’s flood proof house helped though, especially the barricading stairs. If we didn’t want anyone to reach our doorstep, all we had to do was push a button and literally yank the staircase right out from under them. My great-grandfather had built this house to withstand any natural disaster up to a class 5 tornado. Too bad he didn’t realize we live in Indiana and the only real bad natural disaster we’re likely to have
is
a freaking tornado. Still, it made for a unique house and all of his upgrades were convenient for lots of other things too. It was a fantastic defense against solicitors, and on nights like tonight it kept whiny drunk girls from showing up in my kitchen at 4 a.m.

“Who the hell are you bellowing at, Zoe? I’m trying to get some sleep!” My brother Zack loomed in his doorway, a pair of boxers barely reaching his hips. Movement behind him caught my attention and my eyes almost rolled up into my skull. Another new “girlfriend” giggled and pulled his sheets up to her chin. Well, the stairs could keep out the drunk girls my brother
didn’t
drag inside anyway.

“Sleep? Right. Go back to bed, Man Slut. Some drunk chick was wailing around in the yard, but I handled it. Please remember to put the steps down before you release that one back into the wild.”

“You wouldn’t be so pissy if you weren’t so uptight all the time, you know. You live on a party campus and you own a freaking bar. You should let your hair down every now and then!” my brother scoffed. Zack’s hair was so “down” it should reach past his waist, but I was the responsible twin.

“I think you let yours down enough for both of us. I’ll keep mine neat and tidy, thanks.” I closed my door, turned on my white noise machine and pushed a button, sealing all the windows in the house behind their metal storm shields. I had to be at the bar by 7:30 a.m. in order to meet one of the delivery guys and then the health inspector was coming in the early afternoon. I really needed to get a few more hours of rest while I still could. I climbed back into my slightly damp bed, wishing for the millionth time we could have central air conditioning instead of stupid blast doors. The windows in our freaky house are all too small for even a window air conditioner to fit in. During the worst parts of the summer, we’ve actually slept in the basement to escape the heat. It was late September though, so this heat would break with a vengeance very soon and plunge us into icy cold. Luckily, we do have a decent heat source.

I’d crank the A/C as soon as I got into the bar in the morning and finish the rest of my obsessive cleaning in blissful coolness. I lay in my bed, daydreaming about chilled air and gleaming brass rails, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I finally gave up, sighing and crawling out of bed. At least this way I wouldn’t have to make small talk with my twin’s latest conquest over breakfast.

I pulled on my rattiest jeans and a tank top that had definitely seen better days. I planned to do some serious scrubbing, so there was no point in wearing things I’d miss if I ruined them. Tossing a nicer outfit for later into my bag, I grabbed a toaster pastry on the way out the door. I impatiently pressed the control to lower the steps in the kitchen, relieved that the Delta Gamma Tau Whatever had evidently either found her way home or at least wandered far enough that she was sleeping it off in someone else’s yard.

Warm fog clung to the ground; the pavement still hadn’t cooled from yesterday’s roasting sun. Today was supposed to be another scorcher, but I planned on spending most of it inside anyway. My bar, The Firebrand, was snuggled in against the outskirts of the local campus alongside a handful of other bars, fast food restaurants, and coin operated laundromats. The only place open for business this early in the morning was the coffee joint. I was super tempted to stop for a triple espresso mocha latte, but my nearly empty wallet said I should keep walking. The generic mocha coffee creamer at the bar would have to suffice for now since all my money was going back into keeping the bar afloat.

My uncle’s dying words to me had been, “Zoe, take care of the bar and she’ll take care of you.” Unfortunately, he hadn’t really thought through the implications of giving a bar to a pair of kids who had barely turned twenty. Back then, I couldn’t even legally enter the business I was supposed to be running so I’d trusted Deidre and Bruce, the two managers my uncle Rick had hired years earlier, to take care of things. Sure, I looked over their reports, snuck in after hours when I thought I could risk it, but mostly I’d focused on school. The first sign there was a problem came when the health inspector dropped in for a surprise inspection and cited Firebrand with a hefty list of violations. The second sign was when I realized that the paperwork Deidre and Bruce had been giving me simply didn’t match the actual balance in the business bank accounts. The third sign came the day one of the waitresses called me wanting to know if anyone was coming to open up. My managers had skipped town with about $25,000 in cash and product, leaving me with a filthy bar and unpaid bills. Ethan and I turned 21 and I dropped out of school to run the bar full time. I had to try to get it back to Rick’s high standards. Luckily, the house was long since paid for and the medical bills had been taken care of by Rick’s life insurance. We still had a little left to live off, provided Zack took out student loans to pay for school. Of course, the loans would be harder to get now that the government was seriously restricting who could or couldn’t receive financial aid, but it was still his best chance at finishing his degree.

Zack had no interest in running the bar, only in using it to pick up dates. It was never his dream to keep it going, that was mine. Mine and our uncle Rick’s. The bar has been in our family for four generations, as long as the University has been here. I would pass it down to my own kid someday. Not that I had any immediate plans for kids, but you know what I mean.

After the short walk from our house, I unlocked the heavy metal door on the alley side of the bar. Stepping inside the dark back hallway, I breathed in the familiar scents of the old building. I didn’t need to turn on a light. I knew my way around this place like it was my own house. Before the city had cracked down on minors being in places where alcohol was served, I came here every day after school. I helped wash glasses, did my homework in the break room, and played hide and seek with Zack in the basement. Walking towards the employees’ break room, I jumped and banged my shoulder against a doorjamb when a loud thump came from the front service area. Nobody else should be here yet! My heart started to thump as I worried about what I could be walking into, but I charged ahead anyway. I flipped on the interior lights and headed for the seating area, scanning everywhere for signs anything had been disturbed. Twinkle lights made the overhead glassware sparkle, and my reflection bounced back at me from the huge mirror that lined the wall behind the bar top. Hundreds of bottles of liquor gleamed in stately rows. The little thrill of satisfaction I felt while admiring the bar almost made me forget about the weird noise, until I heard it again. Another muffled thump, this time obviously from outside the bar. The plate glass front door was unusually smudged up with hand prints and smears, another chore I added to the growing list I had for today. Looking outside before I reached for the door lock, I began to feel a little paranoid. The hairs on my arms and neck prickled. What if someone was trying to rob the bar?