Guardian (46 page)

The girl was a little younger than me, but only by a year or two. Her hair was a beautiful red color, her eyes a bright clear blue, visible even from a distance. The baggy sweatpants and giant t-shirt she wore couldn’t hide the fact that she was painfully thin, and when I looked closer, I saw the telltale signs of abuse: a long bruise along one cheekbone, what looked suspiciously like a hand print bruise on one delicate wrist, and even a few scratches, some very recent, all over her body, even her face.

“Are you all right?” I asked, resisting the urge to step forward.

“What are you doing here?” she repeated, and then flinched as her body jolted to the left, as though hit by an invisible impact. Her left hand flew to the opposite bicep, rubbing it as her teeth clenched in pain.

“I… I’m looking for someone,” I said slowly, since the girl didn’t seem in any hurry to throw me out. Her eyes watered, and as she reached back behind her, her head snapped backward, as though she had pulled her own hair, I began to wonder if she was a little crazy. The hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle.

“For who?” she asked, her eyes streaming with tears that I assumed were from the hair-pulling.

“A, a man and his friends. My friends,” I said quickly. “He’s tall, dark hair, green eyes, dressed all in black, with about six or seven others, including a little girl that’s only seven years old. They were,” I hesitated, not wanting to seem crazy, but then again, I was talking to a girl who seemed to be doing herself bodily harm. “They were kidnapped, I think,” I continued. “They may have been asleep when they were brought here, or something. A man named Damian may have brought them.”

“I know who Damian is,” the girl said slowly, staring at me for an unnervingly long time without blinking. “I don’t like him. He tells a lot of lies.”

“He lied to me,” I said softly, seizing at straws and taking a tentative step forward. “He told me many lies, and I almost believed them all.”

She shook her head violently. “No. Don’t believe a single thing he says. He’s bad.”

The childish atmosphere made more sense now, and I wondered if this girl was some kind of mental patient. Still, I couldn’t keep back my next question, “Do you know where Damian put them? Do you know where my friends are?”

“I-” she began, and then broke off with a strangled cry. Her arms jerked out in front of her as though pulled and she fell forward, knees hitting the ground first and then landing flat on her face, arms sprawled at awkward angles around her body. A few anguished sobs escaped her, and then a shriek of pain as she clenched the carpet in her fists.

Terrified both of someone hearing and by the horrific scene playing out in front of me, I dashed forward, helping her up off the floor.

“Are you all right?” I asked, brushing the hair away from her small face.

“They’re so angry tonight,” she groaned to herself, and then froze, staring at me with a shocked expression.

I saw her lip had been split and was bleeding – from her fall? Somehow, I didn’t think so – and immediately pressed the soft velvet of my cape to her face to halt the flow of blood. “Who’s angry?” I asked quietly.

She was still staring at me with an expression somewhere between horror, astonishment, and awe. “They left,” she whispered in amazement. “You made them leave. You’re not one of
them
, and you made them leave.”

“One of who?” I asked, still keeping my voice slow and gentle. “And who left?”

She squared her shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I’ll help you,” she said in a steely tone I wouldn’t have guessed she possessed. “I’ll help. I’ll take you to them. If they are here, I know where they would be.”

I tried to control the flood of excitement her words gave me, and focused on her face instead, on keeping my voice slow and steady. “I’d really like that. I’m Lyla, Lyla Evans. What’s your name?”

She stood on her own and offered me a hand, somehow seeming a lot taller than she had before. “You can call me Izzy.” Though I wouldn’t have guessed it, she actually had the strength to help pull me up off the floor. “It’s this way,” she said, turning toward the stairs.

“Just a second,” I said, taking a step toward the bathroom. “I need to change.”

Izzy looked over my party ensemble. “Good idea. If you find them, you’ll need to run.”

I slipped into my jeans, boots, and hoodie as fast as I could, leaving the dress, muff, and cape draped over the sink. I didn’t care what the girl did with them after I left, I was just happy to be on the right track once more. I was almost there, almost to Rafael.

It had entered my head, however fleetingly, that this girl
was
crazy, that there was a very good reason why she was locked away up in these rooms. But my gut, my intuition, told me that I should follow her. God had led my footsteps here. I firmly believed that, had prayed for it over and over. And so follow her I did.

Izzy paused at the top of the stairs to turn and look at me questioningly. “How did you get in here? The door here is locked.”

I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I picked the lock,” I admitted.

She nodded sagely, as though this was all in a day’s work. “And my nanny? Is she down there watching television?”

I nodded. “
Jeopardy
.”

Izzy smiled, and I saw that past the bruises and the cuts on her face, she was astonishingly pretty, with high cheekbones and cat-shaped eyes. “She sucks at
Jeopardy
,” she declared.

I couldn’t help but chuckle softly. “That she does,” I agreed.

Izzy put a finger to her lips as we reached the bottom of the stairs, and I nodded in understanding. No more talking. Together, we crept past the two open doors, past the nurse, who had now moved on to
Wheel of Fortune
. I kept getting the feeling that it shouldn’t have been so easy, and was torn between being glad that it was and praying it wasn’t the calm before a storm broke.

Izzy led me down the hallway I’d gone through before, and then down the same flight of stairs. She stopped when she saw the door to the giant office was cracked open, and turned to look at me.

I shrugged, feeling self-conscious. It was very strange for me to be the guilty one. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked the feeling. “This is the way I came before,” I explained. “But there’s nothing in there.”

Izzy shook her head. “You have to know where to look.” She led the way into the office and across the room to a giant marble fireplace, flanked by two life-size angel statues and walls with built in bookshelves that covered every inch of the room.

She placed a hand on one of the angel wings and took a deep breath. “I found this when I was walking around. They couldn’t see me in the doorway. I don’t know what’s down here, but Damian was leading someone down the steps. If they were taken, this is where they’ll be.” She gave a hard pull on the stone angel’s wing, and unbelievably, the grate and back walls of the fireplace slid away, revealing a very dark flight of stairs. I looked from Izzy to the stairs, wondering if my panic showed in my face.

“I can’t go with you,” Izzy said, sounding a little apologetic. “I can’t be gone long. She’ll be checking on me soon, and I can’t let them catch me with you. I’ll be punished.”

“Punished by who?” I asked, a sinking feeling in my stomach. Was she simply an abuse victim? How could I just leave her? It went against every single bone I had in my body. I knew what it was like, and my heart felt torn. I was wasting precious time that I would need to rescue Rafael, but how could I just leave this girl here?

Izzy shook her head. “They’ll drug me again,” she whispered, sounding scared and small again. “I hate when they do that. Then I can’t fight
them
off.”

The emphasis she gave the two separate ‘them’s’ made me feel as though she was talking about two different groups of people. I ached to save her.

“Come with me,” I said. “Come with us. We won’t hurt you.” I reached a hand out to her, but she recoiled from my touch.

“No,” she shook her head vigorously. “Your friends are like Damian, aren’t they? They’re scary. You’re good, but they aren’t.”

I blinked in shocked surprise. “Like Damian how?” I asked carefully.

Izzy looked at me, and for just a flash of a moment, her eyes reflected the same timelessness I had always seen in Rafael.

“They can fly,” she whispered, so low I almost didn’t catch it. Before I could even think what to say, she lurched forward and gave me a lung-crushing hug. “Thank you for making them go away, even for just a little while. Go. I’ll close the door behind you.”

What was left to say? She clearly didn’t want to come with me, and in the end, my desire to save Rafael was going to win out over a stranger.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to put my heart behind the words. “Goodbye.” I hurried into the fireplace and then glanced behind me as stone grated against stone, catching a glimpse of Izzy just before the doors closed on me.

It was pitch black, and I forced myself not to panic as I pulled my phone from my pocket and used it to light the way. It was a long flight of stairs, and just as the darkness was beginning to play scary tricks with my mind, the floor leveled out and I was faced with a final door. It wasn’t locked, only barred with a heavy piece of wood. I wrestled the bar off, took a breath for courage, and opened the door.

The door revealed a room very much the opposite of the rest of the St. James house. Everything was starkly modern, all new and white and stainless steel. I stepped cautiously forward, seeing human-looking shapes immediately to my left, encased in long tubes of reddish liquid, reaching nearly to the ceiling. Horrified and entranced all at once, I went closer to examine them, and then nearly passed out from the lightheadedness that coursed through me.

Fallen. The long tubes had angels inside them, suspended in the liquid, their wings hanging limply below them, their eyes closed. Wires were attached all over their bodies, leading out of the tubes to big, complicated-looking machines with large screens and monitors. I stumbled backward, bumping into a table and whirling around in shock at the cold metal touching me.

I barely swallowed my scream, only clenched my fists so tightly my nails nearly pierced my skin. Bodies. Bodies and body parts, laid neatly out on long, gleaming metal tables. Some had already been dissected, clean incisions with the skin peeled back and pinned out of the way. They were all Fallen too, some in various positions. One table held only a pair of wings laid out to be examined.

On the farthest of the five tables was a whole body, cut open and gleaming red in the bright sterile lights. I looked at all the implements, the shelves of bottles and liquids and other tubes, and finally realized what was going on here. Someone was
experimenting
on the Fallen. Cutting them open, keeping them captive, as though trying to understand what made them the way they were.

My stomach began to hurt. I could barely keep myself from vomiting, and quickly turned away from the gore in front of me. Vainly trying to look away, anywhere but at those bodies, I scanned the room once more. My heart began to pound as I realized I wasn’t alone.

Along one side of the room was a wall of metal cages, barely large enough for someone to crouch in, stacked two high and six long. There were Fallen inside. Some were slumped over, apparently asleep or tired, no doubt the next victims of whoever was running this lab. With the sight of other Fallen, my breathing quickened. I looked around the room again.

And there, finally, at long last, I saw him. He was here. Rafael was across the room from me, hands and feet spread out and chained so he was standing spread-eagled, a blindfold over his eyes. He was shirtless and covered in a sheen of sweat, his head hanging low so his chin touched his chest. He was dirty, dirtier than I had ever seen him, and he was so bloody. Long, deep slashes crisscrossed his muscular chest, and over his shoulders were deeper wounds, what looked suspiciously like whip marks, but he was
there
, and he was alive.

A curious gargle-like noise escaped my throat, and I ran over to him, wanting to scream to the rooftops that I had found him at last. He was on some kind of platform and I scrambled up to him, only breathing his name when I was close enough to whisper.

“Rafael! Rafael!”

His head snapped up. “Lyla?” he asked, disbelieving. His lips were cracked and dotted with blood, but the deep baritone was the same as ever, making my chest rumble like fireworks and surrounding me with a comforting embrace. “Lyla, is that you?”
“Yes,” I sobbed, trying not to become a hysterical basket case. Standing on tiptoe I was able to yank the blindfold off of his head, and nearly lost it when those beautiful green-purple eyes met mine. “Oh, Rafael!” I cried, and threw my arms around him, unable to keep the tears at bay any longer.

“Lyla, how did you get here? You need to leave. Get out of here!” Rafael said harshly. “They’ll hurt you!”

I pulled back to examine his chains. “I’m not leaving without you,” I said in a firm voice. “I came all this way, and I won’t leave here without you and the others. How are they keeping all of you here? Why can’t you just break free?”

“Everything is either blessed or doused in holy water,” Rafael explained. He strained against the manacles and there was a loud hissing noise. Steam rose from his wrists and fresh trickles of blood traveled down his arms. I wanted to cry at the way they had trapped him, reduced him to this. The Fallen weren’t animals; they weren’t science experiments for dissection and tests. They were
angels
. They were the stuff of dreams and legends, and they were never meant to be locked up. Rafael was always so strong, I hated seeing him like this.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” I promised, standing on my toes again to reach the locks on the chains.

“No!” Rafael tried to jerk away from me and I nearly fell. “You need to get out of here, Lyla! Get out before they come down and find you!”

I gritted my teeth and reached once again for his chains. “I am not leaving here without you! If I leave now, putting myself into danger would have been meaningless. Do you want me to have risked my life for nothing?”