“Who was the protector that he spoke of?” Adeline asked.
Serena rolled her eyes. “Who do you think?” she asked. “Zeke cannot stop boasting of his successes in Berlin. Honestly, I do wish he had stayed away a little longer. Whenever he is in the forest, my skin crawls.”
Adeline grinned. But then she looked over her shoulder, and her smile wavered. Sadness stole over her purple eyes, and Callie followed her gaze. There, amidst the crowd, Alex was smiling down at something his companion had said. She was murmuring in his ear, and he pulled her closer by wrapping an arm around her waist.
He whispered something back, though his eyes were suddenly drawn upwards, and connected with Adeline’s. He grinned a little, as though he knew what she was thinking, and it was a devilish smile. It was the look of a tormenter, a seducer. Callie’s heart broke at the way he taunted her, closing his fingers against the blonde’s dress, speaking softly into the woman’s ear so that she squealed, all the while never breaking the connection that his eyes had with Adeline’s.
Who was this man? Surely he wasn’t the considerate, patient one that had been her closest confidant. He was someone else entirely, a monster. And from the way that Adeline averted her gaze, her expression wretched and torn, she knew it, too.
“Don’t worry,” Serena said, noting her friend’s distress. “She will be in his pile of rubbish by tomorrow.”
“Serena, stop,” Adeline muttered. “He’s better than this. He just doesn’t have much reason to change yet.”
“Yet?”
Adeline glanced back at him. “One day he’ll realize it. Something will cause him to reconsider his actions.”
Serena snorted. “And you believe you’ll be that something? He’s thousands of years old, Addy. If he hasn’t grown up yet, chances are he never will.”
Emeric was still speaking, his voice rippling through the shore, but Callie didn’t listen. She was too absorbed in the way that Adeline was acting; she actually seemed to care. She defended the man who was even now bent on teasing her, and she didn’t condemn him for his actions. It was astounding, this character shift that Callie saw. Had she not known what the future held, she would have never guessed this scarlet-haired Siren to be capable of evolving into such a beast.
Just then, Alex dropped his arm from his partner’s waist. The blonde looked after him in shocked fury as he strolled through the crowd, leaving her behind, his eyes trained on Adeline. Serena gaped as she understood what he was about to do, though Adeline had returned her focus to the shoreline and now watched Emeric, deliberately not looking at Alex as he approached.
Alex stopped beside her, turning his body to face Emeric’s as well. After a moment, still not looking at her, he grinned and said, “Adeline.”
“Alex,” she said in reply, by way of greeting.
His smile grew wider. “Her name is Laura,” he said.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re—“
“Aw, come on,” he said, turning to face her now. “Don’t act like you haven’t been watching me. Charting my progress, are you?”
“Progress?” she asked, still refusing to look him in the eye though he’d stepped in front of her. She continued to watch Emeric.
“My progress. You understand. Of enjoying all of the various women who come before you do. You haven’t been waiting around, I hope.”
“For what?” she asked, still calm, though her eyebrows had drawn together in a sign of approaching anger.
“For this,” Alex said reasonably. “For me to notice your regards. I must say, I’m flattered.”
“Ha!” Serena laughed harshly.
Alex turned his head and nodded. “Hello, Serena,” he said. She smiled sweetly at him.
“Piss off, you—“
“Serena,” Adeline said, “listen.”
The three of them turned their eyes to the sky. Emeric’s face had grown nearly as cloudy as the horizon, the approaching storm growing nearer. “Furthermore,” he said, “it is with a heavy heart that I must now announce our new defensive strategies. Our lost sisters have once again grown too confident. This has happened once before. Unfortunately, I must insist upon a similar course of action as we have taken in the past. In order to prevent the imminent attack, I have decided to send a small troop of protectors to their island to exterminate a small amount of their population.”
An excited, angry buzz swept through the crowd. They seemed to reject this idea; it wasn’t the first time Callie had seen this happen. Emeric held up his hands.
“I understand your reluctance; believe me, I have my own doubts. And I know that some of these women were, at one point, your friends. But their numbers have grown too large. And you must remember that they are no longer the women we once knew them to be. They pose a threat to our people. I believe that Milo would have approved of my plan,” he said meaningfully.
This quieted the people somewhat. They still stood, scowling and upset, their faces a mass of bitterness. But they did not protest his plan.
“Serena, he can’t do this,” Adeline whispered frantically. “If he kills the Sirens, he’s signing the death sentence of everyone who evolves into one of them later on.”
“He can’t be serious,” Serena hissed.
“Is this merely because they abducted him?” Adeline asked. “Surely he isn’t thinking rationally. They returned him unharmed.”
Callie noted Alex’s face. It was set in a grim frown, some of the happy confidence lost for the present time.
“It’s worked before,” Alex ground out, though Callie could tell he was only saying so out of desperation to defend Emeric. “In the time they held him prisoner, the human race suffered a great loss. His anger makes sense.”
“But they weren’t the ones to kill the humans this time,” Serena said. “It’s not like before.”
“And once they realized what was happening, they let him go,” Adeline said.
“It’s worked before,” Alex said again, this time with even less conviction.
“Once,” Adeline said. “But this is different. They’ve done nothing, and we are stronger than they are. This would be murder.”
“Emeric knows better than we do,” Alex said. “If he believes it to be necessary, we must trust him.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Serena said. “Everyone knows this is absurd.”
Alex gritted his teeth, and stalked away, almost all the way back to the forest before he took flight. He wasn’t the only one, Callie saw. Others were taking wing, disappearing though Emeric held his position in the sky. Though no one protested the plan aloud, disgust hung heavily in the air.
Emeric watched in stony silence, his lack of surprise suggesting that he’d expected such a reaction. Adeline and Serena remained, watching him, as though waiting for an explanation that might justify his sentence.
“That is all I have to say,” he said finally. “I will end with an apology for the distress this will cause; I realize the legitimacy of your stances on the matter, and would avoid such actions if doing so were at all possible. You may go.”
A few stood still in stunned silence. Others followed those already departed. Serena scoffed. “This is not happening,” she growled.
“What will we do?” Adeline asked. Callie realized that rather than falling into despair, Adeline seemed to be already in thought.
“Nothing yet,” Serena said. “Emeric is looking this way. Come, we’ll discuss this at your cottage.”
She pulled Adeline’s arm, and they lifted above the ground once again. Callie was glancing backwards at Emeric, noticing a slight look of relief on his features, and wondering what reason he had to be anything but upset, when the tornado-like sensation set in again. She was pulled forward so quickly that she couldn’t see her surroundings, and then she was standing inside of a cottage.
This room was different from the ones she’d seen. Where Shay’s was simple, and Emeric’s was extravagant, Adeline’s was…friendly. This cottage was painted a sun
ny yellow color. The mantle above the fireplace was decorated with carvings of elephants and birds, and the carpet was white shag. There were cushy, soft pink love seats and a delicate red-striped chaise. On the walls were grainy black and white photographs of the Alps, the Eiffel Tower, Adeline and Serena atop the Egyptian pyramids. The room was oddly cheerful.
Thunder clapped again outside, and Callie turned to find the rain break just as Serena and Adeline flew in through the door. They were in the middle of a conversation.
“I don’t understand how he can decide to do something of this magnitude,” Adeline was saying. “It seems like it should take more than a few months to decide something like this.”
“Milo deliberated for years before he was finally forced to attack them,” Serena said, walking into the living room and taking a seat upon the chaise. “Which is why it’s so odd that Emeric is certain Milo would have approved.”
“How was it the last time?” Adeline asked. “Before I came, I mean.”
“It was what you’d expect,” Serena replied, stretching out as Adeline walked around the kitchen counter, disappearing from view for a moment. “Horrible…bloody…. There was a lot of screaming, I remember. It was a total massacre. We hunted them down for days, killing as many as possible before Milo finally called us out. The nights were the worst. We were all camped on the beach, and every snap of a twig sounded like it was a footstep. We kept thinking they’d attack us.”
“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.
The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) Page 16
