Protector

Protector

Kassandra Kush

Also by Kassandra Kush

The Fallen Chronicles, Book One:

Guardian

The Fallen Chronicles Book Two:

Protector

The Things We Can’t Change Part One:

The Prologue

The Things We Can’t Change Part Two:

The Struggle

The Things We Can’t Change Part Three:

The Healing

The Summer I Gave Up Boys

The Lightwood Legacy

Protector

Kassandra M. Kush

Copyright © 2013

All rights reserved.

Smashwords edition 2014

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

The information in this book is distributed on an as is basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Protector

Kassandra Kush

For Information:

http://facebook.com/kassandrakushauthor

Cover © Regina Wamba

Mae I Design

http://maeidesign.com/

For Grandma

You always asked when

I would write a book about God,

and here they are.

Thank you for helping me to

give them such beautiful faces

and being a pillar of faith

to model myself and

my characters after

And for my dad

A father can shape a girl’s life

as much, if not more,

than a mother.

Thank you for never

locking me in the attic

and never ever making me

feel like I had to

earn your love.

Holy Michael the Archangel,

defend us in this day of battle.

Be our safeguard against the

wickedness and snares of the devil.

May God rebuke him we humbly pray,

and do thou, O Prince of the

Heavenly Host, cast into Hell,

Satan and all wicked spirits

who wander the world,

seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.

Yet I hold this against you:

you have lost the love you had at first.

Realize how far you have fallen.

Repent, and do the works you did at first.

Revelation 2:4,5

INTRODUCTION

All my life, I have been afraid. Afraid and alone. Even surrounded by people, I was always on my own. Defenseless against those hurting me. I’ve always had to fend for myself. Never did I think I would find someone who could protect me. Who would stand beside me for all of eternity. Who could save me from all my fears, could simply banish them into the night.

And yet here he stands next to me.

CHAPTER ONE

Therefore, says the Lord: See, I bring upon them

misfortune which they cannot escape.

Jeremiah 11:11a

All my life I’ve been lied to. Ever since I can remember—ever since my mom died, basically my first memory—they’ve told me lies.

Oh yes, your father does love you, he’s just a very, very busy man.

Stop hurting yourself, there are better ways to get attention.

What would your father say if he saw you do that to yourself?

I knew what my dad would say: nothing. Wasn’t that what his absence in my life meant? I saw him only sporadically throughout the year, and it was never just the two of us alone.

Besides, I wasn’t the one hurting myself. They were hurting me. All my life, it was me against them, and they always won. But I was done with all of this. If being out on my own was what it took to escape the physicians, doctors, psychiatrists, and research, so be it. I was done being called crazy.

And that was how I found myself, teeth chattering, swaying back and forth in the empty box of a railway car.

I sat stiffly, holding back whimpers of pain every time my arm was jerked or pinched. I could feel it breathing on my neck but the presence was so familiar I found it easy to block out when there was just one alone. I was bored, wondering when the train would ever stop and where I would be when it did. I was starving and hadn’t thought to stuff anything edible in my backpack. At the thought of buying food, the stretching of my cash, only $200, I was suddenly on a tight leash.

Lesson one learned, Izzy, I thought to myself. Remember the essentials to human life, like food, and then pack them!

The walls of the boxcar shook violently, and my eyes flew open once more as I looked around. To my bewilderment, there was suddenly someone else standing in what I had come to think of as my boxcar.

It was still dark outside, my escape having been planned for midnight, but I could clearly see the outline of a man standing just inside the open doors of the railway car. Somehow, some way, he had managed to jump aboard the moving train. But when he took one step into the box car and I sensed that the presence currently pulling my hair skittered away, combined with the lithe grace I saw in just that one step, I realized why he had been able to jump aboard the moving train.

He was one of them.

I tried to back farther into my corner, clutching my backpack as though it was a lifeline. In a way, it was. It kept me tied down to sanity, from losing myself completely. I’d made hardly any sound but I could tell he had heard me moving because his head snapped around in my direction, obviously able to see me in the darkness.

The richness of his deep, rumbly baritone filled every corner of the train. Sorry, I didn’t know this car was occupied. I won’t be any bother. He walked to the opposite corner from me and as he settled down on the hard floor, he looked much more comfortable and at ease than I was.

I stayed totally tense and rigid for a good fifteen minutes, my breath coming in short little gasps, my teeth chattering noisily in a combination of cold and now fear. I was terrified and kept my eyes trained on him, wondering what he would do next.

I didn’t wait in vain; barely five minutes later he stood up and walked toward me. I squeaked in fright and buried my face in my hands. I didn’t even want to see his face.

Easy, easy. His voice was like surround-sound speakers, pressing in on me from every side and making my chest rumble along with the noise. I had never heard anyone with such a powerfully commanding voice. Even as I retreated from it, in the back of my mind I sensed it wasn’t foreign, was something I had heard before.

I looked up at him through my fingers and saw with surprise that he was removing his coat, which was a dark brown with a bomber-style collar. Without another word, he semi-tossed the coat over me and retreated back to his corner. I heard him mutter something about my teeth chattering and I realized that he had done it because he had been annoyed.

Scared as I was, I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I pulled the coat around me more securely, shivering in relief at the warmth still clinging to it from the stranger’s body. It smelled wonderful too, a mix of spicy man-smell and homey cleanliness, like fabric softener, a new, fresh scent I’d never encountered before.

I kept my body stiff and rigid however, never once relaxing or looking away from him. I would have to get off as soon as the train stopped. I had to get away from him. He might know my father. He might even have been sent after me and was just waiting for the right moment to take me back home. I had to constantly be on my guard.

In the end, the stress of having one of them right there next to me, along with the exhausting excitement of my escape, combined with staying up all night, caused me to fall into a dead sleep. When I woke up, the train had stopped and he was gone. I almost thought I had imagined him, but the proof he had been there was easy to see; he had left the jacket, and it was still draped over me, still practically radiating heat.

I didn’t know why I put it on and took it with me as I hopped off the train. It could have had fleas or lice or any number of nasty things, especially if the man was homeless. But it smelled so clean that I couldn’t convince myself it was dirty at all, and it was such a nice coat that I couldn’t bear to leave it on the dirty train.

Not that it mattered, in the end. I had barely gotten out onto the sidewalk away from the railway tracks when a police cruiser pulled up next to me and my grand adventure was cut abruptly short.

Isadora!

I cringed, turning to see Mrs. Turner, my longest-lasting nurse, rushing toward me. Everyone here called me Isadora, the name I hated. No matter how many times I pleaded with them to please, please call me Izzy, they refused. Only my mother had called me by my full name, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from anyone but her.

Isadora St. James! Mrs. Turner sputtered my name again, as though just my first name hadn’t been effective enough for the situation. She grabbed my arm and pushed back the sleeve of my own jacket, over which I still wore the stranger’s bomber jacket. My pale skin was a constellation of bruises, small cuts, scratches, and red pinch lines. There was even a handprint-shaped bruise that, when matched up, I knew would fit my own hand perfectly.

You run away, and look what you do to yourself! Mrs. Turner was horrified. "Upstairs, now. Medication, shower, bed. See if you get another moment to yourself ever again, young lady. Up you go."

I obediently did as she asked, going through a routine that was so familiar, I could do it in my sleep, and often it felt like I did. I’d become an expert at the way my life was run, and even though I had recently turned sixteen, I was still treated like a six year old. Mrs. Turner coached my every motion, always directing me. Telling me to make sure I flossed after I brushed my teeth, getting the shower running for me before I got in, and insisting on inspecting the rest of the damage I had inflicted on myself in my less-than-twenty-four-hour flight from the haven of home.

After she had berated me for the wounds (the worst being a very nasty scratch that went from above my knee all the way down to my ankle), I was allowed to take my shower. While it stung my cuts and scratches, I welcomed the steamy water, staying in so long that Mrs. Turner had to come in and turn the water off when she thought I was standing in there trying to bruise myself again. But I was really and truly warm again at last. Then, dressed in pajamas and sitting in my big canopy bed, I obediently swallowed the three pills Mrs. Turner handed me with quiet sips of water.

No more of this, she hissed at me before leaving. If you try anything, anything at all, I will come up here with more pills. Sleeping pills.

I nodded obediently, and the fear must have shown in my eyes, because Mrs. Turner turned away, apparently satisfied I was taking her seriously. And I was. I hated taking sleeping pills. I couldn’t wake up when they were hurting me.

There was a time, back when I was about six years old, when I thought I was going crazy. That was when I was still allowed to leave the house, when I still went to my private school and was surrounded by children my own age. Two weeks after my mother died I had awakened after an extremely fitful and restless sleep filled with terrible nightmares, only to find that they had not been nightmares at all. My arms, legs, torso, even my cheeks, were spotted with small bruises and scratches.

My nanny thought I had done it to myself, to get attention from my father or out of grief from losing my mother. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but no one believed me when I told them I had felt the pain in my dreams, that someone else had done it to me. I was promptly bundled off to the psychiatrist and stuck in therapy. She thought I was lying too, and was always ‘trying to get to the bottom of the issue.’

The wounds didn’t stop there. It was mostly when I was alone, but not always. More often than not, I was tripped by invisible forces right in front of my peers, or my hair was pulled painfully, making me shout out so that my nanny thought I was vying for attention.

One can only imagine the terror I felt. I was only six, I had just lost my mother, my best friend and only defendant, and some invisible force was hurting me constantly, making fun of me, embarrassing me.

No one would believe the true story—that I wasn’t doing it to myself. I was desperate to stop it, to do anything and everything they asked me to do, because they were grownups. I thought then, as a young child, that they knew better. Adults knew everything, and surely they knew how to stop me from being hurt. I took the pills, the medications, the therapy, all without question, thinking that this one, this one, maybe this one would finally help me.

At ten years old I was pulled out of school, considered a danger to others, and confined to my bitterly lonesome old mansion with only nurses and caretakers for company. At eleven, when I woke up screaming, shoving off the invisible thing hurting me, I overdosed on my medications, begging it to stop, stop, please just stopstopstop. I was rushed to the hospital and had to have my stomach pumped but lived through the experience. I only realized afterward that the adults could only be wrong. That taking pills, any kind of pill and in whatever amount, wouldn’t stop them.

I was stripped of any freedoms and liberties I may have had before, and had to be under constant supervision. But somehow, it just got worse. The deeper I sank into despair, the worse it became. I lost weight, became a bruised and beaten skeleton. It took only a moment when the nurse’s back was turned and they would strike.

Sometimes it was just one, and I could feel it’s hot breath panting in my ear before it struck me so hard in the stomach that I lost my breath. Other times there were more and I could hear them, hear their quiet squeaks and growls as they argued with one another, clawing me savagely. I was like a puppet and they controlled my strings. Nowhere was safe.

And then, just as suddenly, somewhere was safe. Three years later, my longest-lasting nurse, the redoubtable Mrs. Turner, had come into my life and she came from sturdy, Irish Catholic stock. She’d promised my father there was no getting rid of her, no matter what I did to her or myself, if he could have mass said in the private chapel in our house three times a week. Thanks to my father’s money, influence, and power, it was an easy deal to strike. Having no one else to watch me, I was pulled to mass and many extra trips for prayer as well.

I couldn’t ever remember being in the chapel before Mrs. Turner arrived. My mother had never gone in there and I’d rarely seen my father at all, even when she was alive. After her death, I was lucky to see him once a year. He was certainly never what one would call a devoutly religious man. I’d always felt vaguely ill whenever we crossed the threshold into that old, Gothic-style room. My stomach hurt, my head ached and it was hard to think clearly or make words focus on a page. But as soon as I’d entered that room, my attackers were nowhere to be found. That first day I spent a whole hour there, completely untouched.

At first, I’d thought they were gone for good. That I was finally free and my torture was over, and even though my head spun and I had to grip tightly to the rail to remain standing, I loved every minute of it. Then we left the chapel and I was mobbed, pushed to my knees and then my chest and with so many little bodies sitting on top of me that I couldn’t catch my breath. Mrs. Turner had dragged me to my feet and told me to quit trying to protest, a dose of religion could only do me good and I was going to suffer through it, and without the drama please.

The chapel became my haven. Whenever things got really bad, when they tormented me without ceasing, I would run for that tiny little room with the golden tabernacle at the head behind the small altar, and though it cost me clear vision, caused ripping migraines and shortness of breath, I had found a haven. I wasn’t being constantly beaten.

There were days, weeks even, when they would leave me alone. Otherwise, eventually, someone else would have been able to truly detect them. But they were smart, clever, and they knew that I needed to be able to be well for periods, to avoid being completely locked up in an asylum. But they never left completely. They always came back. Eventually I had to leave the chapel and I was at their mercy, all by myself, as it would be forever and onward. I’d accepted that long ago. Or at least I had—until the mere presence of someone else had made them disappear.

With my damp hair in a braid over my shoulder and cocooned by dozens of blankets and pillows, Mrs. Turner decided I was well enough for the night and left me alone. I pulled my sketchbook onto my lap and opened it. Thumbing through the pages, anyone would think I had some sort of obsession with fantasy creatures. And maybe I did, but with only one creature—whoever or whatever had been plaguing me since my mother’s death.

I’d never been able to see them. No one had; it was why I’d been branded crazy and was locked inside this house, usually only in this attic bedroom nearly all my life. All I knew was that for some reason they delighted in harming me, teasing me, torturing me. And the only thing that made them stop was being in a church or around people like the man on the train. People like Damian, Sadie, or Abram. My father’s ‘friends.’

Unable to see them, I had been drawing prospects of what had been after me for years. Encounters with them, along with my drawing skills continually improving, had changed and adjusted my perceptions through the years. They had started out humanoid, as big as me, until they had begun jumping on me and harming me with more purpose. That was when I realized they were smaller and more animalistic, only the size of a cat or medium dog. And the claws. The claws that scratched me almost daily were long, much longer and sharper than any animal I had ever encountered.

This book was nearly full of animal-hybrid creatures of various ferocity, all drawn within the last month. I didn’t think any of them were quite right. But intermixed with them, peeking at me every few pages, were drawings of Lyla.

Lyla Evans.

I still had no idea who she was, what had brought her into this world of mine, how she had made my haunts go away without being one of them—like Sadie. But she was friends with some of them. She had asked me to come along, to escape, and I had been too scared. Too scared of her friends, this Rafael man she had spoken of with such love. Oh, how I regretted that choice now, months later.

Now, I wanted nothing more than to escape.

Today, picking up my thickest charcoal pencil, I worked on a new subject: the man from the train. Slowly, the dark shadows of the corner of the boxcar came into being, along with the man sitting there.

I had only caught brief glimpses of his face in the dim light, but it had been beautiful, handsome and chiseled, as all his kind were. I shouldn’t have been able to draw him so definitively but as I drew the planes of his face, the cheekbones that were just as strong and prominent as my own, he somehow felt familiar to me, as though I had seen him before.

The idea made me pause in my drawing. Had I seen him before? Had he ever been here, to see my father? Was that how they had found me so quickly? But no. I couldn’t recall this man ever setting foot in my house. Surely I would have remembered him. Though he was one of them, he seemed too golden, too upright to ever be mixed up with Damian or my father. I felt it about him. He reminded me of Lyla, had the same calm, easy air about him.

I turned to a fresh page and sketched just his face, my fingers moving with the ease of long familiarity. What was it that had ingrained this man’s face so firmly and clearly in my mind? I shaded the sketch entirely in black and white, but after a moment’s hesitation, pulled out my darkest navy pencil and added just a touch of it on his eyes. I knew that it was the right color, even though it had been much too dark to tell.

I sat in bed drawing for another hour until I was sure Mrs. Turner was asleep and wouldn’t hear me moving around. I had become nocturnal over the years of imprisonment, preferring the privacy and stillness of the night, and slept during most of the day. Tonight, they were strangely absent, and I wanted to enjoy my peace for as long a time as possible.

I knelt before the antique trunk at the foot of my bed and opened it, pulling out the dress. It was made of cornflower blue silk, the bust covered in winking royal blue sequins above the empire-waist skirt. Shedding my overlarge t-shirt and sweatpants, I slipped it on. I was taller than petite Lyla so the skirt hit a little higher above my knee than was fashionable. It was also snugger on the bust but looser around my ribcage. It was hard to eat while being pinched and tugged, and food, good food worth eating, was hard to come by when the world thought you were crazy. If I ever filled out, I would be a taller, curvier version of the slender, delicate Lyla Evans.

She had left the dress in my bathroom the night she had snuck into my house, the night I had helped her to free her friends, along with the white fur cape and muff. I put them on as well and the delicate blue and silver high heels which pinched my feet, but not too horribly. I walked around the room as delicately as I could manage, listening to the heels click against my scarred wooden floors and imagining I was a modern day princess. I had never, not in my whole life, owned anything so pretty, so grown up. I giggled at the idea of a sixteen-year-old girl playing dress up.

But the clothes were so much more than that. They symbolized Lyla, a life outside of this prison. A girl who had acted, didn’t sit passively as life moved on around her. Lyla was brave and fearless, and I wanted to be just like her. She had made them go away and I wanted to find out how.

So I was going to do the most daring thing I had ever done in my whole life: I was going to run away, escape this small world. And then I was going to find Lyla Evans and ask for her help.

CHAPTER TWO

And the Lord said to Satan, Whence do you come?

Then Satan answered the Lord and said,

From roaming the earth and patrolling it.

Job 1:7

Three months passed before Mrs. Turner decided I no longer needed to be watched every second of the day. I spent the time in my room, watching from the windows as summer, then fall, passed by. In no time at all, winter was upon us again, and the days dragged on. My initial escape, several months after meeting Lyla, had been a trial. Now, I had to stop myself from going for the real thing. The supervision over me lessened with winter and would continue to fade as I myself faded once again into the background of the house.

Those first warm days of March would be my saving grace. March, the month of freedom. It came in a blaze of sun, February instantly forgotten amidst the unseasonably warm first week of springtime.

This month, I would escape. And this time, I would succeed. I would find Lyla.

Two days before my planned escape I was coming back from the kitchens with a bag full of non-perishable food for my journey, correcting the error of my first attempt to escape. I usually tried to avoid wandering alone around the house and mainly stuck to my attic room and the company of Mrs. Turner. I was reminded of this when I ran into not just Damian but Sadie and Abram as well on the stairs.

Damian was abrupt and condescending, Abram was aloof and cold, but oh, Sadie was cruel, the worst of them all. I loathed her, hated her with every fiber of my being. For no reason at all that I could see she had decided to make me her own personal punching bag, delighting in torturing me every single chance she got.

I stood completely still, frozen in fear at the sight of all three of them blocking my path up the stairs to my room. Sadie caught sight of me first and her big brown eyes widened in wicked delight.

She was taller than I was, model-thin with shimmery golden hair that fell straight down to her elbows. She would have been beautiful, clearly had been at one time, but it seemed age was beginning to show in small crows feet at the corners of her long-lashed eyes. Her nails were long and sharp but seemed prone to broken and jagged edges, and though she tried to mask it with perfume, a scent sometimes wafted from her and Abram of something old and rotting.

"Well, if it isn’t little Isadora," she sneered, giving my full name a mocking emphasis, making me feel childish and inadequate.

Damian eyed me with disinterest and then rolled his eyes, stepping away from the stairs. "Come on, Sadie. We don’t have time for this. We need to find Joshua and Noah before they do."

Abram backed up as well to join Damian but Sadie stayed, blocking my way.

Need to get up the stairs, Isadora? she asked, a lilting smile flitting across her pink lips. Her faint trace of a Southern accent just detectable, sharper the more cruelly she spoke.

I stared at the floor, unable to meet her gaze. Yes, I whispered.

From the corners of my eyes, I saw just the top of Sadie’s waist as she leaned forward and lifted a hand to sarcastically cup her ear. What’s that? I can’t hear you.

"Yes," I repeated but only a fraction louder, still inaudible to the others in the room.

In a movement too fast for my eyes to follow Sadie snapped her arm out and seized my chin in a harsh grip, her uneven nails biting into my skin. She forced my face up so I had no choice but to look into her eyes.

"No respect, she spat. You will look at me when you answer me, do you understand? Now tell me, do you want to get up these stairs?"

"Yes," I ground it out through my clenched teeth, tears of shame and humiliation filling my eyes.

Then you say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Sadie’, do you hear?

I stared at her, wishing I could run away, was brave enough to stand up to her. Sadie’s nails pierced my skin, bruising my jaw.

Say it! she commanded, squeezing even harder.

Excuse me, Miss Sadie, I said, my tears of shame winning out and spilling down my cheeks. Oh, how I hated to show weakness around the three of them. But I had lost every confrontation I’d ever had with Sadie.

She finally let go, pushing me away so I stumbled onto the stairs, clinging to the banister for support. I stared at the floor, trying to catch my breath and blinking away the hot, stinging tears. I waited for Sadie to leave, now that she had had her fill.

Pathetic, she murmured, just loud enough for me to hear, and then there was the sound of three pairs of feet retreating down the hallway.

I sank down on the bottom step, staring at my trembling hands. My teeth were even chattering. There was just something about the threesome that made me shudder, something about their kind that filled me with an icy dread that chilled my breath and froze my insides.

Lowering my hands, I noticed something glinting on the floor at my feet and picked it up. It was a feather, well over a foot long and the same icy white-gold as Sadie’s hair. Scanning the floor, I found another one that was a watered-down coffee color, and one more that was the darkest ebony I had ever seen.

One each, for Sadie, Abram, and Damian.

I was gone before anyone realized it. My initial escape a year ago had only been a test, a trial of how difficult it would be to leave the house and how long it would take them to find me—if anyone had cared to look. I had never planned to stay out in the city, hadn’t bothered to hide when the police car had pulled up beside me.

I wasn’t so foolish to go without practicing first. The initial escape had proved no one would be watching as I left and, apparently aside from the police, no one would really care if I was missing. Except Mrs. Turner, who would no doubt miss her salary and free accommodations.

This time it was even easier to escape than before. My father wasn’t even home, nor were the others. Sadie, Damian, and Abram had left with my father on some mysterious business to which I was not privy. But all it did was make it easier than ever to slip from my house in the dark, early morning.

The city was calm in the early pre-dawn light, completely silent but for the whispering of wind between all the trees. I walked carefully along Riverside Drive, alert for any cars, but none passed me the whole way into Grandview. I waited anxiously at the bus stop where I caught a COTA bus to downtown Columbus, thanks to the bus pass I had purchased and printed out online—much simpler than hiding in a train.

I wasn’t sure how to find Lyla, where to even begin looking, but simply being free of my father's house was an exhilarating feeling in itself. For the time being I took advantage of my freedom, walking into a nearby McDonald’s and ordering my fill of greasy, delicious fast food, enjoying every bite with blissful rapture. In the early weekend morning the city was quiet and also filthy, the streets full of litter, half-eaten food, and abandoned trinkets.

I walked along Grant Avenue sipping my Coca-Cola, which was so sweet and fizzy it sent ripples of delight through me. I could count on one hand the number of times I had been allowed to drink soda pop. I walked aimlessly as dawn crept over the city, feeling no threat, as it was still like a ghost town. None of them seemed to have found me either, or were interested in torturing me at the present moment. I was still amazed at how thrilling it was to walk, with no limit on how far I could go or anyone telling me which direction to take.

And the city. I had done extensive web searching, looked at pictures galore, but it was so much better in real life to see all the skyscrapers rising so tall above me or hear a garbage truck rumble past. No amount of Internet schooling could have imitated the experience of being asked for money by a homeless man (I gave him five dollars). I stood in awe at the massive structure of the downtown public library and promised myself I would return when it opened in an hour. Then I ventured into the park behind it, which was full of hedge bushes cut into life-size human figures.

Hedge people sat at a picnic near a pond, or strolled along the paths in big Victorian dresses with parasols. I was admiring the hat of a girl my exact height when the hair on my arms raised and prickled with goose flesh, and I closed my eyes in despair. I could hear it, the whispering of little mouths speaking unintelligible words. They had found me.

Now I could even hear them moving, a rustling in the grass, excited murmurings, and I began to back slowly away. They sounded vicious, more so than normal.

A church. I should have kept my eyes open for a church. I should have stayed near one, so they wouldn’t catch me out in the open. What if someone walked past and saw me struggling, apparently against myself? I would be locked up for real this time, or returned home in the blink of an eye.

I backed up, edging away from the impending attack, until I found a brick wall at my back and could retreat no further. I closed my eyes and covered my head… and there was no attack.

Instead, the earth trembled beneath me, once, twice, three times, and then I heard voices. I opened my eyes and felt my body tremble anew, but this time out of fear.

Them.

Three men stood before me, three men just like Damian and Abram. Three men whose wings were still outstretched in the dim morning fog. They looked unrealistically tall, but every inch a threat, silent and menacing. I shrank farther back and down against the wall, hoping to remain unnoticed, as for the moment, their attention seemed to be focused on my would-be attackers.

Grab one, commanded the man in the middle. He had gleaming chestnut hair and matching wings. Take it back to the loft.

The other two, one dark-haired and the other burnished blond, bounded forward, moving supernaturally fast, so quickly I almost missed the movement. Whatever they were chasing apparently eluded them at first, since the blond man swiped, cursed, and then leapt into the air, rising at least six feet before crashing down, destroying a hedge person but finally catching it. He took off once more into the sky, golden wings unfurling to carry him away.

The other two made motions to turn and leave, but then the dark-haired man caught sight of me and murmured to the other man. The chestnut-haired one turned sharply and our eyes met. My pulse skyrocketed, and my breathing reached a point nearing hyperventilation,