The Guardian

by Elicia Hyder

  “What?”

  “Before she left, she said remember what I told you. What did she tell you?”

  Guilt flashed across Fury’s face. “It’s not important.”

  I doubted that.

  “Are you still coming with me?” Fury turned her arm over, and touched the symbol etched inside her wrist with her fingers.

  “You know I am. Theta’s vision freaks me out, but it’s just another item on the list of the many things I’m certain will try to kill you.”

  “What was it?”

  I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. “It’s not important.”

  She had the faintest hint of a smile.

  “I’m not flying with you, however. Now that Reuel is here, he’s a much safer option.”

  Her eyes darted away.

  “Are you all right?” I touched her arm, and she pulled it away.

  “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  As she turned, I grabbed her hand. “Fury.” It was like I could feel the pain pulsing within her. When she met my eyes, hers brimmed with tears.

  Her jaw tensed. “I’m fine.”

  My head tilted toward the couch. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

  She looked down at our hands, then her fingers curved slightly around mine. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  I squeezed, then released her. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Warren.”

  When she was gone, I went to the half-bath and changed into the gym shorts and white T-shirt I’d bought. Then I brushed my teeth before returning to the couch.

  Lying there in the dark, I called out to the spirit world. “Iliana?”

  No response.

  She was probably still asleep. And if not, the power probably didn’t work inside Echo-5. Still, I tried one more time before giving up.

  Laying there in the quiet, I let the darkness I’d barely been keeping at bay seep into my mind. Flint was dead, and no matter what anyone could tell me, I knew he wouldn’t be—at least not yet—had I not been on the helicopter.

  And Fury. Even before Theta’s vision, the cuffs had already burned her. Twice. I was leading her to Nulterra to die, and I knew it.

  God, I needed to shut my brain off.

  I looked around me, then reached for the remote control on the end table behind my head. I turned on the television, digital escapism with the push of a power button.

  American Dad was on. It had been about a century in Eden time since I’d watched it. I turned the volume almost all the way down and settled into my pillow.

  My eyelids had just started to fall when my ears heard the unmistakable sound of a door latch sliding.

  A moment later, Fury crept by the back of the couch.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked quietly.

  She stumbled sideways, gasping and grabbing her chest. “Holy shit. I thought you were asleep!”

  “Sorry.” I tried, and failed, to suppress a grin. I raised my watch and pressed the night-glow button. It was almost 1 a.m. Maybe my eyelids had been a little more than heavy, because I’d been on the couch for over an hour.

  Fury walked to the kitchen. I heard a few cabinets open and softly close, then the tap turned on. She returned a few moments later with a glass of water.

  I dropped my feet off the end of the couch. “Wanna watch cartoons with me?”

  She looked at me, then down the hall, then back at me. After a second of deliberating, she walked around the sofa and sat down on the far end. I moved my socked feet onto her lap, and she immediately shot me a glare.

  I smiled but didn’t remove them. And she didn’t make me. She just sipped her water and looked at the TV.

  Family Guy was on.

  I lifted the remote off my chest and tapped her shoulder with it.

  She shook her head. “I know you love this show.”

  I had loved it when life was simpler. When life was life at all.

  “I’m going back to bed in a minute anyway,” she said.

  The light from the TV flashed on her face, and I noticed her eyes were swollen again. She’d been crying in her room.

  My mother had been killed in front of me when I was still part-human. And even though those old feelings had been replaced with new happy ones of her in Eden, they stirred now for Fury.

  After another sip of water, she put the glass on the end table and scooted her lower half closer under my legs. Then she leaned against the armrest, using her forearm as a pillow.

  I slid my arm down beside my thigh until my fingertips graced the top of her foot. I slowly released a wave of subtle energy between us.

  Sloan had called it my voodoo power to put her to sleep. It was really a tiny bit of Eden that every spirit thirsted for. Nothing soothed a weary soul quite as well, and even as an Angel of Death, it was a healing quality all angels carried to Earth.

  Fury yawned. “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  Her eyes were barely open. “No.”

  And soon, she was fast asleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The doorbell rang at 5:17 a.m.

  My eyes popped open. An angel was at the door.

  Fury bolted upright as Azrael walked into the living room. He paused, looked at us—me on one end, her on the other—and smiled. Great.

  “Who’s here?” I asked, pushing myself up.

  Azrael opened the front door.

  The angel on the other side spun around, ripping off his (presumably) designer sunglasses. “I’m back!” Ionis walked inside. “Miss me?”

  “Not really.” Azrael closed the door behind him.

  The messenger looked like a sherbet cone in a lime green button up with two-sizes-too-small pink shorts. His hair was spikier than usual. Whiter too, if that was possible.

  “Oh, great. Ionis is here,” Fury grumbled, flopping back down onto the couch.

  “Good morning, Angry,” he said, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  Fury groaned.

  “You heard about that?” I slowly stood and stretched my arms over my head.

  “We all heard about that.”

  “How?”

  “Somebody told.”

  “Who?” I was alarmed.

  Ionis raised his hand. “Guilty.”

  “You were at Shannon’s yesterday?”

  “Close. I followed you.”

  I looked at my father for an explanation.

  Azrael walked to the coffee pot in the kitchen. “The messengers and the Angels of Ministry don’t have the same effect on other angels the way more powerful choirs do. So I’ve had Ionis keep tabs on the area. If there’s a problem, he can communicate with the whole of Eden if necessary.”

  Not a bad idea, I guess. But still surprising, considering how much Ionis irritated my father.

  Fury walked past me. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Need some help?” Ionis asked.

  She shoved him sideways as she walked by.

  He laughed. “Always good to see you, Fury.”

  Ionis and I walked to the kitchen. “What are you doing here so early?”

  “Azrael had me bring a load of gear from the command center. Ugly stuff, all camouflage and black.”

  “I made him a list of everything you might need for your trip that was probably destroyed in the crash. Rucksacks, CamelBaks, the works.”

  “When do you leave?” Ionis asked me.

  “Six.”

  He covered his mouth. “Oh, I hate goodbyes.”

  “Good to know.” Azrael slapped him on the back. “You’re going with them.”

  Ionis gasped. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Oh no. Oh hell no. I’m not going to Nulterra,” Ionis protested with a hand on his chest.

  “You’ve sworn your service to me. You don’t have to go into Nulterra, but you will go there and be my eyes and ears for what’s happening.”

  Ionis’s shoulders sagged. “But it’s
hot.”

  “Good thing angels can’t melt then,” Azrael said, pouring three mugs full of coffee.

  “You really think it’s necessary?” I asked.

  “You said you were having trouble communicating with the natives on the island, so I’m giving you a translator.”

  “Sorry. He has a point,” I said to Ionis.

  He crossed his arms. “But I don’t have a—”

  “Why do you think I had you grab four of everything?” Azrael asked. “You’ll have everything you need.”

  Ionis’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Which was rare.

  Azrael handed him a mug.

  “But I don’t have any clothes.” He held up a foot clad in some sort of bedazzled sandal. “And I have no shoes for the jungle.”

  “I’m sure you and Warren can find plenty of time for shopping.” Azrael raised his cup to his mouth. “You love Manila.”

  “Azrael,” Ionis whined.

  “You can watch from the auranos once they’ve crossed over, but I need someone who can get a quick word to Eden if there’s trouble.”

  Ionis’s shoulders dropped and his head fell back. He started to say something else, but Azrael shook his head. “Discussion is over.”

  “Fine.” Ionis huffed and walked to the table.

  Azrael smiled at me. “How’d you sleep last night, Warren?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t even go there.”

  “Why? Where’s he going?” Ionis asked.

  “Warren and Fury were on the couch together when I got up to make breakfast this morning.”

  “Ooo,” Ionis said.

  “We weren’t even touching. Nothing happened.”

  “OK.”

  “I mean it, Az.”

  He held up a hand and chuckled. “I said OK.”

  At six, we dropped off Fury and Reuel at the airport. We’d repacked all our rucksacks, and it was decided I’d take the blood-stone cuffs with me.

  At the curbside for departing flights, Azrael and I got out to say goodbye. He hugged Fury. “Please take care of yourself, and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Do I ever do anything stupid?” she asked, pulling back to look at him.

  “Before this weekend, I would have said no. Now?” He nodded his head. “Absolutely.”

  Behind them, Reuel was nodding too.

  Fury held up her middle finger and laughed.

  My father pulled her in for another hug. “Seriously, we need you to come back whole.”

  “You forget, I’m tougher than I look.”

  He looked at her face. “I never doubted that for a second.”

  Azrael moved to release her, but she grabbed his arm “Flint would want to be cremated. Nothing elaborate. No wasted expense.”

  He smiled gently. “I’ll take care of it. We’ll have a memorial when you get back.”

  “He wouldn’t want that either.”

  “A small gathering in remembrance then. I would like to have one,” Azrael said.

  “Why?” she asked. “You, of all people, know he’s not there.”

  He leveled his gaze with her. “It’s not for him, Allison.”

  She looked at the ground but didn’t argue. Then she hugged him again before he walked away. “Thanks, Az.”

  “Thank me when you get back.” Azrael shook Reuel’s hands next. “I feel better knowing you’ll be there. Take care, old friend.”

  Reuel pumped his fist.“Cak vira.” There was no word in Katavukai for “goodbye,” so “see you later” was our standard farewell.

  We stood there as they walked to the sliding glass doors. My eyes followed Fury.

  “She’ll take Flint’s death harder than she’ll let on. Keep an eye on her,” he said.

  “Like it’ll do any good.”

  “Her father died, Warren. I know the two of you have a rocky history, but afford her a little more patience than usual. She needs it.”

  When we left the airport, Azrael drove me and Ionis two hours out of the state of North Carolina, through Knoxville, and north off the I-40 interstate.

  He took a sharp right off the main highway onto an unmarked dirt road.

  “Where are we going?” Ionis asked from the middle seat of the transport van.

  “Somewhere safe. You’ll see.”

  We drove several miles through the woods until we finally reached pavement again. Then the road dead-ended at a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire coiled across the top. A Humvee was parked just outside it with a .50 Cal mounted on top. The gunner aimed right at us.

  Other humans were present in the area, watching us from places even I couldn’t immediately see.

  “It’s Jurassic Park,” Ionis whispered, wide-eyed, as he leaned between our front seats.

  “Even better. It’s the Secret City.” Azrael got out as a heavily armed man in a Claymore shirt walked out of the guard post on the other side.

  A simple white sign was posted at the walkthrough gate.

  NO TRESPASSING

  Y-12 SECURITY COMPLEX

  US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

  I should have known.

  “What’s the Secret City?” Ionis asked.

  “Seriously?”

  “Warren, I gossip for a living. I don’t care what Azrael and his lackeys cook up down here on Earth.”

  “This one isn’t Azrael’s doing. This is Oak Ridge. Birthplace of the atomic bomb.”

  I’d known for a while that Claymore Worldwide Security had an installation outside Y-12, but this was the first time I’d ever seen it with my own eyes. It was pretty impressive to think my father had been so close to something I’d only read about in textbooks.

  But I guess that would be true for a lot of things in history.

  After exchanging a few words, Azrael returned to the driver’s seat, and the guard walked back to the small building. The massive, mounted machine gun turned away from us, and the gate slowly slid open.

  “You are quite the man of mystery, aren’t you?” I said, eyeing my father from the passenger’s seat.

  He smiled but didn’t look at me. “This was the second Claymore base ever, built back in 1943.”

  “Where was the first?” Ionis asked.

  “Chicago,” Azrael and I answered together.

  That one, I’d never forget.

  Chicago. The city where I was born. The city I never hoped to be in again. Too many memories. 99.9 percent of them bad.

  “Chicago was where the first controlled nuclear reaction was created. Claymore was originally formed to protect humans from themselves,” Azrael said.

  Ionis laughed in the backseat. “I remember that. You told the Council that man had started playing God, and none of them were smart enough to have that much power.”

  I grinned. “Sounds like Az.”

  “It was true then. It’s still true today.” Azrael drove to the top of a plateau and turned left. “But this place was my first baby. Even today, it has one of the most sophisticated underground fallout bunkers ever designed.”

  “More sophisticated than the one you’re building for Iliana at Wolf Gap?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but this is the test site for everything that’s happening there.”

  “How close is it to being completed?” I asked.

  “Maybe two more years.”

  “I hope we’ll never need it.”

  “Me too, son. Me too.”

  It wasn’t much farther before the trees thinned to open grass. The clearing had a three-story brick building, a portable trailer marked “Office,” and an aluminum airplane hangar.

  Outside the hangar was a parking lot full of black Humvees like the one we’d seen at the entrance. In the distance, across another narrow patch of woods, was a water tower and the tops of two dormant smokestacks.

  The facility appeared to be small, about the same size as Wolf Gap, and it was old, judging from the age on the bricks of the tallest structure. But if I knew anything, it was to not be dece
ived by the modest exterior.

  Somewhere a door would lead to a hidden metropolis.

  He parked by the brick building, and the three of us unloaded. “Do you have everything you need?” Azrael asked.

  “Probably not, but how the hell do you prepare for this trip?” I strapped my sword across my back, put on my heavy rucksack, and grabbed the blood-stone case off the back floorboard. “We’ve got first-aid supplies, MREs, and three liters of water each.”

  “You and Ionis and Reuel should conserve yours for Fury. I’d be leery of the water sources down there, if there are any. What about a gas mask?”

  “I brought two from the command center,” Ionis said, struggling to get his backpack on.

  I looked at the airplane hangar. “Do you have any skydiving harnesses and goggles around here? Might come in handy if we get into another situation where I have to fly us out of somewhere.”

  “Don’t want Fury to have to hang on cowgirl style?” he asked with a grin.

  “I’m sure she’d appreciate it.”

  “Let’s go see.” He led the way to the hangar.

  Inside, a man in mechanic’s coveralls walked over to us, wiping his hands on a dirty rag. “Can I help you?” He was eyeing us suspiciously, mostly staring at Ionis dressed like a cupcake and carrying a military bag bigger than he was.

  Azrael looked around the large room. It had a small jet and a Cessna. “What’s your name?”

  “Dave.”

  “Hi, Dave. Do we have any skydiving equipment?”

  The man’s face crumpled with confusion. “Excuse me?”

  “Skydiving equipment. Harness, goggles. That sort of thing.”

  The man just stared at us.

  “Dave?” Azrael snapped his fingers.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Who are you?”

  “He owns this place,” Ionis said, teetering backward with the weight of the rucksack. I grabbed its top strap to steady him.

  “Excuse me?” Dave asked.

  Azrael reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Then he held his Claymore badge in front of the guy’s face.

  The man looked at the ID, then back at Az with wide eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, Dave. And I need skydiving equipment if you’d like to keep your job.”

  Dave moved like someone had set his shoes on fire. “Do you need a tandem harness or a solo?”