by Maria Amor
It had been two years since he’d come into his full abilities as a Guardian of the West—aligned with the element of water; he had met with Ruth on that occasion as well, when he’d made the choice not to pursue a life that had been built for him as a Guardian. Even before he’d come into his abilities, the politics of the Guardians had been boring, frustrating—infuriating. When he’d submitted a song, he’d written to a contest as a joke, and it had won, he’d seen his ticket to freedom.
The chauffeur pulled through the gate and started down the long, wandering driveway. Dylan tried not to fidget in the back seat, conscious of the fact that he was about to speak with one of the most important, powerful people in his alignment, and he didn’t know what she wanted from him. Was it the issues that had put him on, for lack of a better term, probation before the Guardian’s council?
Or was it something else? Ruth was old, but Dylan had few illusions about the extent of his power. The position she held in the council wasn’t one that he could ever hope to take up. Maybe the council asked her to talk to me one-on-one. Maybe she insisted she would do it.
The car turned a corner on the drive, and Dylan took a quick, deep breath, trying to still his nerves. Even two years after the onset of his full abilities, his control and mastery of the effects of his energy was inconsistent. His parents had said it was because he’d come into his abilities as a teenager, and not as a full adult; Dylan didn’t think that was entirely the truth, but he had given up arguing with them about it.
He closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the frame of the back-passenger door. If he focused just enough, he could call together the water in the atmosphere, let it coalesce into rain; but he was fairly certain that kind of trick would just make Ruth angry. Not to mention that if she wanted to, she could redirect it.
When he’d been younger, he’d spent a few weeks on a few different occasions in the company of the most powerful water-aligned Guardian; his friendship—at the time—with Julia, her granddaughter, had been part of what had prompted the invitations, although his own father was water-aligned as well, and loyal to Ruth. His mother, like Ruth’s mother, was fire-aligned, though she too was loyal to Ruth, at least as far as decisions went in major conclaves of the Guardians.
The house appeared almost as if out of nowhere, and Dylan had to smile slightly to himself. As he approached the center of the property, even through the car, he could sense the magic that coursed through the place.
Ruth and her husband had taken it for that very reason: being next to a large river, it was home to a portal for nymphs and other water-spirits, a major access point for anyone of the water realms seeking to enter the United States. The entire property pulsed with the energies that coursed through it, but they were strongest in the area directly around the house and in the backyard, where Dylan had played more than once as a pre-teen.
The only regular humans who could see it were supplicants: people seeking to tap into the magic of the river for the purposes of a blessing, or help from the water spirits. Anyone else—anyone Ruth might want to see—had to be brought to the house, and even then, they would never be able to remember quite how to get there, and wouldn’t be able to find it even if they drove up and down the road leading to the house for hours.
As the car completed the trek down the driveway to the front of the house, Dylan took the last few moments to absorb the changes that had come over it since the last time he had visited, two years before.
One of the manifestations of Ruth’s great power was the fertility of the land surrounding her house, and she took more than a little pride in showing it off: trees arched up around the main building, a safe distance from crashing through the roof but so old that Dylan thought they might have been saplings when the country was founded.
Slightly raised beds contained a riot of flowers, some of them clearly not suited for the climate, living side-by-side with standard fare for the area, growing even more vigorously than the average gardener would have expected: phlox and daylilies mingled with wisteria and canna lily, lavender poked up amidst geraniums.
The big stone house had partially greened over with creeping ivy and honeysuckle, and two enormous arches—one at the beginning and one at the end of the walkway leading to the front door—were positively covered in viney roses, blood-red and pink and white, all of them seemingly blooming at once. Blown petals and blooms dotted a vigorously green lawn, but not a single dead leaf appeared anywhere.
The house itself was two stories tall, in gray, brown, and tan stones with cream-white mortar between them. A blue-green door—a color that was Ruth’s signature—covered by wrought iron work, completed the impression of an old, impressive home, bigger than one would think an elderly woman could ever have use for. But Dylan knew as well as anyone in his world that her age was deceptive; while Ruth was over 100 years old, and sometimes acted it, she was strong enough, vital enough, that she could work and move around like someone half her age.
The car came to a stop at the top of the driveway, and Dylan unbuckled his seatbelt, smoothing his long hair at the top of his head as best as he could. His parents had insisted that he take a shower, dress appropriately, and do what he could to tame the long, blond locks he’d grown at the age of twelve and maintained with nothing more than the occasional trim; he’d put on a suit that he’d last worn at a boring awards show, along with a pair of worn sneakers.
He waited obediently for the driver to open the door, in spite of his impatience to know what Ruth had in store for him. Maybe it’s the terms of my probation, he thought wryly. He’d been confined to his house ever since the council had decided against him; after two years of non-stop touring, recording, and promotion, at first it had seemed like a welcome change—but then after a few days of doing nothing, he’d thought that he might go crazy if he didn’t have a chance to leave and have fun.
The door opened and Dylan swung his legs out of the car, supporting himself on the frame as he emerged from its comfortable depths. “Thanks for getting me here so smoothly,” he told the man, holding his hand out. The driver—Dylan thought he might be an undine-changeling—accepted it quickly and then stepped back. Must belong to Ruth herself, Dylan decided.
He started towards the walkway, trying not to hunch his shoulders, trying to look confident as he approached the house. Somewhere inside, Ruth waited; but he was certain that there were cameras, if not people watching for him, and that one way or another the old water-aligned Guardian would know how he behaved as he came to her.
His guess seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the door opened just as he stepped under the arch closest to it, revealing a tall, slim woman, probably about his mother’s age, dressed in deep, ocean green, with auburn hair pulled back from a plain face with no makeup. “You’re Dylan Kelby,” the woman said with a faintly accented voice; Dylan nodded. “Please come in.”
He stepped through the door and closed his eyes. The inside of Ruth’s house smelled exactly the same as it had the last time he’d been there: the green-damp smell of plants mingled with the warm smells of cooking and baking, and an undercurrent of dried cedar and pine. Dylan followed the woman through the tiled entryway and past the kitchen, into the room he knew was Ruth’s favorite place for formal meetings.
The old woman sat on the couch, as upright as an in-shape sixty-year-old, dressed in her favorite colors of blue and green. Her steel-gray hair was pulled back from her seamed, wrinkled face, bottle-green eyes staring out at him from under white-flecked black brows, through long, dark eyelashes. Her hands, folded on her lap, bore the ring with her seal on it, her wedding and engagement rings, and two others—an aquamarine the size of an acorn and an oval amethyst, half an inch across, that took up the space between her hand and her knuckle.
“Dylan,” Ruth said, rising to her feet in a smoother movement than Dylan thought even he could manage. “It’s good to see you again.” She almost smiled; there was the impression in her unearthly eyes that she was happy, b
ut her lips didn’t quite move.
“I’m glad to see you too,” Dylan said, trying to keep his voice even. “Though I’m not sure why you invited me.”
“Have a seat,” Ruth said. “Esther will bring in the tea and we can discuss the situation at hand.” What the hell is the situation at hand? But Dylan sat down in the chair that Ruth gestured to, on the other side of a low, antique-looking coffee table.
A moment later another woman came into the room from the kitchen, with a silver tray in her hands; she looked vaguely familiar, but Dylan couldn’t quite place her: tall, slim, with blonde hair in a bun and blue eyes like gleaming crystals in her face, he thought she had to be either another Guardian, or in some way connected to the paranormal. She set the tray down silently, and Dylan moved—as he knew he was supposed to—to pour tea for Ruth.
He’d never really enjoyed the drink himself, but at least, as he poured, he recognized that it was one of Ruth’s “special” blends—made from herbs and plants she’d grown herself, steeped in purified river water. It was in its small way a kind of magic, and he wondered just what the elderly woman had in store for him. A tentative sip from his own cup made his tongue tingle slightly with hot-cold sensations, but it went down easily, and he took another.
“Now,” Ruth said, setting her cup and saucer down after her own first sip, “we need to discuss your future, young man.”
“My future?” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that.
“When I was your age, I’d already had my second child,” Ruth told him. “Of course, standards change—you’re still a child according to the laws of the land, even if you’re in full possession of your abilities.”
“Yes,” Dylan said. Where is she going with this?
“And since you’ve fallen out of favor with the council, you have to watch your steps,” Ruth added.
“Yeah—I mean, yes—I’m aware of that.”
“You need to do something to get back into their good graces,” Ruth explained.
“If I ever want to leave my house again,” Dylan said, nodding.
“How would you like to stay somewhere else for the next few months, before you return to school in the fall?”
“I hadn’t planned to go back to Sandrine,” Dylan countered.
“That’s the only place that will take you at this point, and while your parents might be okay with you continuing private tutoring, the council is not,” Ruth told him sharply. “So you will be going back to your normal school in the fall, and you will continue there at least until you are eighteen years old—even I can’t make demands of you then. Not really.” A faint hint of a smile appeared in the old woman’s eyes once more.
“That’s...good to know,” Dylan said, puzzling over the whole of her comments. Somewhere else for the summer? And then back to school? The older water-aligned Guardians get, the more mysterious they feel like they have to be, he thought irritably.
“I talked to your parents about a way to regain some of you—what do you kids call it—well, whatever you call it: your credibility with the council,” Ruth explained. “As you might be aware, my granddaughter will be coming into her inheritance soon.”
“When she turns seventeen, right?” Ruth nodded. “What about Julia?”
“She’s unstable, in terms of her energy manifestation,” Ruth told him matter-of-factly. “The council is nervous about that. They also are of course nervous about an elemental as strong as she is, from a family as powerful as ours is.”
“So what does this have to do with me?” Ruth actually did smile at that point, her subtly lined lips curving for just an instant.
“As of right now, it has everything to do with you,” Ruth said. “You are going to help me, help my granddaughter, and in the process, help yourself.” She picked up her cup and saucer and took another sip of her tea. “Have some of the cookies—let me know if Esther obeyed my recipe.”
Dylan picked up one of the blond-colored cookies from the tray and ate a bite, following it with a sip of the tea. Julia is not going to like this, he thought; he didn’t know what Ruth wanted for him, but he was certain that whatever it was would bring him and his former friend into contact once more, and he was just as sure that Julia had even less interest in being around him than she had ever shown in obeying her grandmother’s wishes.
“Let me explain to you what I expect, and how I expect it to come about,” Ruth said. “Then, since you know Julia on a different level from me, we can discuss how you think this should begin. And we’ll come to an agreement from there.” Dylan plucked another cookie off of the tray and ate it in one bite, washing it down with half of the tea in his cup.
“Okay,” he said, interested but not entirely trusting. “What did you have in mind?”
CHAPTER THREE
“We’re almost there.” Julia glanced balefully at her mother from her seat in the car; she’d had to get up early to go to her grandmother’s house, just when she had hoped to be able to sleep in, in her own bed. The letter from her grandmother had been—as she’d thought—a summons. She’d managed to get away with ignoring it for an entire day, but the next morning after she’d received it, her mother had called her before classes to inform her that she had heard from Ruth, and that she was aware that Julia had been summoned.
Imagine what it would be like to have a normal family, without a grandmother who can just ‘summon’ you whenever she wants, Julia thought bitterly, shifting in her seat. She had been, for all intents and purposes, on “lockdown” while her mother arranged to go to her grandmother’s house; Julia wasn’t sure why she’d taken such trouble, since Ruth had apparently made it perfectly clear that while she wanted to see Julia, she had no interest—at that point in time—in seeing her daughter. It’s like having the Queen of England as your grandma.
“I don’t see why you came with me,” Julia told her mother, even though she’d pointed it out before—in fact, right when they’d left from the apartment a few hours before. “Grandmother doesn’t want to see you, and I’m not a little kid who’d get lost at the gas station.”
“Your grandmother asked me to escort you in her car, so I did,” Julia’s mother said.
“Afraid she’ll write you out of her will?” Anger flashed through her mother’s slate-blue eyes and twisted her lips into a grimace.
“You are going to have to watch your tongue,” the older woman said in a controlled, tight voice.
“I thought one of the strengths of my air alignment was that I have the gift of gab,” Julia said, keeping her voice deliberately light.
“And with it you need to learn when to keep your mouth shut. Your grandmother won’t appreciate you mouthing off to her.”
“She summoned me,” Julia said, lifting one shoulder in a half-shrug. “If she didn’t want the pleasure of my company she shouldn’t have had me dragged here against my will. And if it bothers her she can send me away.”
“She can do more than that,” her mother countered. “This is not how we raised you.”
“But it’s what I am,” Julia retorted. “We didn’t have to leave at six in the morning. We didn’t have to come the first morning after I got home from Sandrine. My bad attitude is at least partly your fault. I’m a growing teenager, I need my sleep.” Julia’s mother closed her eyes and she watched as the older woman took deliberate, slow breaths.
Her mother had been a truly unstable Guardian—a water elemental born with heavy fire characteristics as a ‘throwback,’ she’d never fully adapted to her abilities like some of her siblings had, and while she’d managed to parlay her mixture of energies into a successful life as a runner for the council, she had never—as Julia’s grandmother had mentioned more than once—achieved what her powers suggested she was capable of. Added to that, she’d made a marriage that Ruth had considered “somewhat unfortunate,” choosing as a mate a man who was half-pushover, half-passive aggressor.
Julia saw the trees that surrounded her grandmother’s home and took her own deep breaths; i
n spite of her bravado to her mother, she was more than a little concerned at a summons from her grandmother that would lead her mother to hop-to so quickly and readily. She closed her eyes and felt the air-energy flowing through her. Grandmother was impressive, she was even imposing—but she couldn’t exactly do anything against Julia’s will. She would need Julia’s cooperation for whatever it was she had in mind to do with Julia.
The car turned onto the drive, and Julia opened her eyes to look at her mother. The woman looked strained, worried. “What are you so concerned about? If Grandmother is in the mood to be shifty with anyone, it’ll be me.”
“The fact that she wants to see you on your own bothers me,” her mother admitted. “This must be important, but she doesn’t trust me to be a part of it.”
“I’m going on sixteen, and only a little more than a year away from taking on my full abilities,” Julia countered. “Obviously, she wants me to start making choices of my own free mind.” Her mother looked at her.
“That’s not exactly like her,” her mother said. “She usually wants people to do what she wants.” Julia barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Her mother might fear the most powerful water-aligned Guardian on the planet, and she might respect the older woman, but she also harbored obvious resentments. We’ve got that in common, at least.
Before she knew it, the car had come to a stop. Julia unbuckled her seatbelt and opened the door, not even waiting for Ruth’s driver to come around to help her out. She knew it was rude—uncouth, as her grandmother would say—but she didn’t care. She wanted to get the whole set-down over with as quickly as possible.
Julia gestured for the driver to go back to his post, and breezed through the first of the two rose-arches along the walkway, striding towards the front door of the house. She pushed her shoulders back and lifted her chin slightly as she heard the car driving away from the house—leaving her there. I could find a way home if I had to, she reminded herself, taking another quick, deep breath as she reached the second rose-decked archway before the door.
