Page 3 of Torn Between Two Worlds

Alcott snarledin frustration and shook his head. She was almost in hysterics. Her breath was coming in short gasps, and she was flailing around. Lunging forward as best as he could in the small backseat, he was able to clasp her arms to her side. He was grateful, in her world, her body was still because he could only imagine the trauma and issues such commotion would have caused since no one else could see him.

In truth, he had known something was wrong with him since the night before. He had felt pieces of his subconscious slipping away. More than once, he had found himself pulled back into the book series he was from for a short period of time. Not in the way that happened when she came to visit him there, it was more like simply returning to the books. When she was there, his life pushed forward, non-prewritten events occurred, and he truly felt real. When he returned on his own, by choice or not, all that happened was an endless circuit of fulfilling plots in the books as others read them. Not that he had known any of that prior to her, but the idea made him uncomfortable once he was aware.

He'd assumed she'd been having a nightmare, and that was why he couldn't stay. It happened, she didn't have the best control over the doorways that he and the evil she drew to her used to come through. Then that morning he had felt lighter. He couldn't see anything wrong with himself and hadn't been in any pain. So he'd kept quiet. Alcott had been shirking his duties for a few weeks and had assumed, whoever the trench coat man was, he had been watching too and was annoyed. He assumed the guy was pissed and just making his time with her more difficult.

For years, he had watched her with a quickening in his gut and a hardening below it. He could never tell her that, though. For one thing, he was the one who had put off her attempts when she had been a child. Then he hadn't looked twice at her. When she was sixteen, he had begun too. Besides, she'd been with Derrick so long by then, there wasn't a chance, but she still looked at Alcott as she had when she was young.

When he had first heard something call out to him, someone had appeared and told him the rules, which included a sensual relationship between a Word Speaker and their Guardian that created a stronger bond. He'd been put off by their age difference and hadn't thought about it again, but at sixteen the torture had begun.

He had also been told that Ciara was different. Her power had manifested itself when she was only fourteen, and the typical age was twenty-one. He'd been told she would be a huge target every time she picked up a book because of it. Had he been evil, it would have been safer for her, the good guys never tried to take out the Word Speakers, he assumed. At first, he had tried to convince her not to read at all. In the end, he accepted he would just be busy protecting her. Helping her. Loving her.

Normally, watching her didn’t affect his ability to protect her. But this, but that morning, he had almost let an attack go unnoticed. She didn’t see his brother, Calel, step through the shimmering doorway. She didn’t notice how his magic had almost slipped through Calel's body as if it wasn't even there. Alcott had no idea how she missed it, but he was damned happy she had. ‘One should always be grateful for the small miracles in life,’ his mother had always said before Calel had sacrificed her for his own dark magic.

“Who's going to help me through this now? I don't have a real brother. I don't have someone to cry to at night when the separation cuts through the silence in my now single girl apartment. It's supposed to be you, Alcott. Damn it, it's supposed to be you.”

Tears were streaming down her face in steady rivulets now. Had he not been with her through many crying fits after her parents’ death, he might not have understood the garble of words she had spoken. To see her cry, after so many years of closing pain out killed him.

He had no response for her. He knew he was leaving as well. It all made sense. Things changed with time, and this was merely one of them. As her reading habits had shifted with age, so had the evil in the books, it became stronger. What had once been just his brother's magic and some paltry serial killers had changed into demon kings and fallen angels. Things that he was not equipped to protect her from and barely did. She would require an appropriate type of Guardian, someone immortal and from an appropriate series, not a human witch. That, paired with his lack of sexual interaction with her to strengthen the bond. He'd known it would happen sooner or later. He had just been naïve with each year that passed and had thought it would be later.

His fists clenched at his sides as he forced himself to let go of her. His nails bit into this palms, and he had no intention of healing them. He wanted the scars. He wanted to remember how he'd messed up and done the right thing by his Word Speaker all at the same time. His voice was clipped, curt even, as he tried to act as if nothing was wrong, to make her stronger.

“Come on now. We never really thought I'd be your only Guardian. Whoever comes next will most definitely be better able to protect you. That's why they would be coming through to you, because I am no longer enough.” He sounded like a dick, even in his own ears.

He didn't want her in his world when their connection was severed, so he gently pushed her with his mind to returning. He'd always had a bit of compulsion, but felt dirty using it. He needed to use that power, or she would never leave, and who knew if she could get stuck there. All it really took was him picturing her out, the same way she brought herself in.

Glaring at him, she wiped the tears from her eyes and climbed back into the front seat. She muttered curses at him the whole way, he didn't mind, it would most likely be the last things she ever said to him, and he wanted to hear them all.

In his head, he said all the goodbyes he needed to. In his head, he told her he had loved her for a while, but the guy she was looking for wasn't him. In his head, he swore he would figure out a way to get back to her, to protect her.

In reality, Ciara went up to her apartment alone, simply assuming Alcott was lagging because he knew she was mad. The book she had been reading the night before lay creased open on the couch, and when she opened the door to her bedroom, a man with an alarmingly cocky smile sat on her bed.

He looked at her and said, “Hello, sweetheart, I'm Stryder. Apparently, I'm your new Guardian.”

2

She stared at him. She absolutely just stood in her doorway staring at him. She didn't look him up and down, she didn't scream as she had with Alcott. She merely stared at the form on her bed, dropped her car keys and bag on the floor, turned and raced out of her apartment.

Alcott just had to be in the car.

She was convinced that he was just angry with her for entering his world from her backseat. He would still be there to say goodbye and help the new Guardian learn everything. She stopped halfway down the stairs as fear struck her. Would he have been told the rules the way Alcott had been before he even got to her? Would Alcott just begone?

A gasp escaped at the thought, and she took the remaining stairs two at a time and crossed the parking lot.

Finally, standing in front of her car, she fell into a crying fit for the second time since this hell had started.

He was gone.

Alcott wasn't sitting in the backseat. He wasn't anywhere in the car or standing at any point on the path from the car to her apartment. He was gone.

Her knees buckled out from under her, and she crashed into the concrete in front of the car, not even feeling the pain that raced a path up her leg from the impact. Tears continued their descent down her face and sobs wracked her body. She could barely feel the cold December ground beneath her butt or feel the wind whip across the tears on her cheeks. The stinging trail they left behind was also lost in her numbness. All she could feel was her heart shattering and flying in a million different directions. The only family she had left was gone.

It had been just her and Alcott since the car accident. Her parents were only children, and her grandparents were long gone from the world. All the years she had spent dreaming of a time when he would be real to everyone was gone in the blink of an eye. She'd had so many plans for them; things to see, people to introduce him to and getting to see her own kids have a larger family than she’d ever had.

It was all just gone.

A vibration finally pulled her out of her own head. Sniffling, she ran her hands over her eyes and cleared her throat. Her phone, Derrick must be calling. Smiling a little, simply because he was something familiar, she worked a moment to steady her voice before answering the call.

“Hey, Derrick.”

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