The Guardians - Between the Worlds (Book 2)

“I wish I can go back in time and stop being an idiot. I hate him with all my soul. He didn’t even drop a tear. He had a cold look when he left. So cold that I felt shivers on my back. I don’t feel anything now. Just hatred.”

This is what Lily thinks while she’s walking on the Base’s corridors. After two days she had spent locked in her room, she decides to stretch her legs. She decides to stop crying. The Guardian’s looks follow her carefully when she passes by them. Some are of pity, others blame her, others are careless, and some may want to encourage her not to give up. But she doesn’t mind them, even if she feels them on her so rough. She feels ashamed but keeps her head up, for she doesn’t want to let Dean take away her last piece of dignity without even being present.

“How proudly she walks”, Addison speaks on the background. “I told you that she’s a hypocrite. She moved on. She did the same with Isaac. It’s called Karma because the way she played with Isaac broke his heart. Now it’s her turn.”

Lily turns around and sees Alice next to Addison, looking at her in a different way. What had happened to her friend? She let herself be used by Addison so easily? It seems so because she was always with her, and she hadn’t really been there for her since she had got back from between the worlds.

Lily takes a breath and approaches Addison calm, wearing the same tough mask she has been wearing since she came out from her room. She’s two feet away from her when Alice takes a step back. She knows Lily pretty well but, even though, her look doesn’t portend anything good.

She is now standing face to face with Addison, looking her straight in the eyes. She touches her shoulder, and Addison remains stone still. She wasn’t expecting from Lily to really answer her somehow. But she continues, walking her hand close to her neck, touches her hair, creating a tension and making her lose the control she thought she had over the situation.

“I won’t hit you because that’s something you are expecting me to do. If you will speak one more time about my feelings about Isaac, about me or what I do and feel, it will be the last time when you open your mouth. And it will not be a very pleasant moment for you”, Lily tells her and walks away slowly, letting Addison go, but she still remained stick on that wall.

Alice looks at both of them, without knowing for sure what she had got herself into, and she sees Addison touching her neck subtle, coughing and arranging her hair on the back. She doesn’t say anything about Lily though, for she had seen something inside her eyes, something that looked like a flame of a mad person. And this was Lily now because she had gone mad in a certain way, trying to keep her feet on the ground. Too many feelings kept hidden inside were turning her into another person, one she had avoided becoming all her life. Mean, evil and careless.

“What was that?” asks Brook, who watched all from upstairs.

She couldn’t run so fast so she could catch Lily near Addison, but the problem was that she hadn’t felt a thing during that moment. Neither anger, rage, hatred, feelings that she had felt when Lily had attacked Addison for the first time. This got Brook pretty worried.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Brook wants to protest, to say something, but she can’t find her words, because the Lily she knew was a Lily full of feelings, of explanations, who would have said anything else besides “nothing”. The fact that she had in front of her a Lily that was stone cold was making Brook tremble.

“A word, Lily?” Artemis asks her as if she was afraid of her answer.

“Sure”, says Lily walking away from Brook.

“Lily, I am so sorry. I don’t even know how to begin.”

“I know. What if you leave aside bad feelings and tell me what do you need? I saw that you didn’t expect either from Dean to do those things, so I won’t blame you for anything.”

Artemis notices a change in the behavior of the girl who has made her feel so many things at the time, and coldness wasn’t one of them.

“I came to you hoping that I will find some understanding of him. I know there’s no excuse for what he did, for how he betrayed you, but there has to be an explanation. We can’t give up on him. You two have something special, it can’t just vanish like this after he makes a decision behind a closed door.”

“Artemis, me and your son lived a big fat lie, for he admitted this when he said that I am a child and I influence people with my feelings. I plan on showing him that I’m not like he thought me to be, that he doesn’t know me, and especially that I am not a child anymore. And it doesn’t matter how much I would have wanted before to fight for him and to believe that what he was doing wasn’t his will, I can tell you that I looked into his eyes and he answered to me, just so only I can hear it, that what he does was what he thought it was right, that he is not influenced by Leonor in any way. The way he betrayed me and the rest of the Guardians is outrageous. So please don’t come to me hoping that you’ll find understanding because you won’t find it anymore.”

The woman looks lost at her and thinks that everything is so wrong around her, that people she cared for were changing and becoming different in a matter of hours.

“Something’s happening here… Dean leaves everything behind, changes his opinions in a couple of minutes, and you become a cold-hearted being too damn fast, from the sweet girl I have met.”

“It seems so.”

“Where is the Lily who saved the rebels? Where is the Lily who put her life at stake for the Guardians and for feelings?”

“It seems that your son has buried her when he revealed himself” answers Lily and walks away, leaving her in the middle of the room without any right to reply.

Artemis has no other option but to go to the only person she couldn’t really trust, so she heads mumbling to her son’s office, where Tamara’s sitting now. She knocks at the door, and when she hears her sharp voice from inside, she walks inside insecure. She closes the door slowly, bites her lip, and she sits then on the chair in front of the desk. Tamara has on the table a bottle of wine, which was half empty.

“I was hoping that I could speak with you, but I think that you’re not in your best shape”, she says and stands up.

Tamara puts a glass in front of her and pours wine into it.

“And I was hoping to find a drinking buddy for my expectations. Drink with me. I don’t think that we have anything better to do at this late hour in the evening.”

Artemis steps on her pride lets the guard down, and she remains there, with the woman she could never trust. Why? Because of Zoltan and the other tyrants who were leading the Bases. This is how, during the night, Artemis finds out that Tamara is a sensible woman, with a good heart, maybe the only one who had been the same and stayed the same during the last couple of months. They share life stories, experiences, for their ages are alike, and they finally come across the common topic: Dean.

“Your son knows what he wants from life.”

“I know the story of you two.”

“Then you must know that I appreciate him.”

“Of course.”

“I strongly believe that he put me in charge because he needed someone to take the right decisions with the head, and not with the heart. That’s why he didn’t choose Lily. And if he did this, it means we have to wait for a sign. He has a plan. I refuse to believe that the Dean I know has changed after some exchanged words with Leonor.”

“Oh, this is where I was afraid to end up. You changed pretty fast. You changed sides pretty fast. What if he saw in Leonor what you saw in Zoltan back in the days, and he’s now following her because he truly believes in her?”

Tamara looks on the ground.

“I honestly didn’t expect to that reaction from him with Lily. Public humiliation… it was his lowest weapon. He broke her heart, and that moment would have hurt anyone. It changed Lily instantly. She became the girl full of hate and anger, from the innocent girl she was.”

“Not really. She killed Zoltan and other Guardians. She’s not that innocent…”

“Anyway, I’m afraid that she might want to prove him the opposite now. And, believe me, I care about Dean, but his behavior has led to the destruction of a beautiful person.”

“I noticed it. Lily has already started working on that.”

“Zoltan has always considered her a strong person. Special. She is the Great Guardian. She still doesn’t have the powers fully developed, but if she wants she can unleash hell around us without making any hard effort.”

The night passes, and the two women end up from talking about Dean to talking about Lily, and they both agree that they have to keep an eye on her, for her behavior becomes strange. She wonders if that’s only a mask or a true way for her to get through the humiliation she had been put through. They both came with arguments, trying to debate the problem like true detectives. So, the morning finds them closer than a night before, like they were friends for a lifetime. Sure, the three empty bottles of wine had something to do with it, and the sleep was the best solution for all the problems.

In the morning of the sunrise, far away from Base Redfeed, in an area which was keeping a lot of feelings and memories from the history, the piece of the portal was appearing again. It lights small and purple, but only at the beginning, because when it gets bigger, the image is not an attractive one at all. Certainly, it didn’t look like a fairytale, when from the purple light appear some black claws, and after that a pretty small body, which leaves behind a black trace. Then another creature gets out and starts crawling in the sand. The demons are small at the beginning, but they get bigger with every hour, feeding with the energy of this world. They spread around the hot sand, each of them going on different paths but, at one point, they come out in a big number, too big to being counted.

But after demons, other creatures crawl out, monsters with horns and dragons with sticky wings, as small as the demons were in the beginning. The traces left by them would have frightened anyone, but it wasn’t anyone around to see them. They’re making strange noises, that were not heard before in the Guardian’s world, for this is the time when the history of their world changes. The dragons, demons and the mythological creatures haven’t set foot in this world through a piece of the portal, but only through the Wall’s Portal. Exactly, when it has collapsed.

The wall doesn’t send any signs that it’s about to collapse though, but small portals appear along the horizon, but too small to be noticed by anyone. Soon, they are too crossed by black claws, which are leaving black and sticky traces behind. And they’re all heading to the Redfeed Base, even if they had started on different paths at first. Something attracts them there, a weird energy, a smell, a presence.

The presence that has opened their path through the Guardian’s World, the presence who has been traveling the worlds, who had opened their way to a new era. The era that was going to pass on in the books of mythology from the Human’s World.