by Lexi Ostrow
Darker Side of the Worlds
The Guardian Series
Book Two
By
Lexi Ostrow
Published by Hot Ink Press
An Imprint of Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing
This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Copyright 2015 Lexi Ostrow
Cover by Dreams2Media
Edited by CLS Editing
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
Chapter One
Dale gave a small groan as he rolled over in bed. A smile spread across his lips as he stretched his arm to the right of him. The smile immediately vanished when his hands brushed across nothing but cotton sheets.
He was upright in bed before a normal person would have been able to blink. His heart sunk as his eyes locked onto the dark purple sheets. Nessa wasn’t there. Nessa was always there. She didn’t have to be, but he and his Guardian had grown infinitely closer since he’d gained a new outlook on life, thanks to Ciara transferring him her powers. Nessa typically stuck around rather than going to back to her books, unless he went with her.
Dale slammed his feet onto the carpeted floor as he leapt out of the bed. Don’t freak. She may just be in the kitchen or something. He twisted the shiny golden colored handle on the bedroom door and pushed it open. There was nothing out there save for the leather couch and television. He may have had a healthy paycheck, but he’d never gotten around to furnishing the condo. Washington just hadn’t felt enough like home.
“Nessa? Nessa are you in the bathroom?” He didn’t wait for a response as he walked across the bedroom to the closed door, gave it a little knock and pushed it open.
Empty as well.
She could have gone home, back to her world in her book. Logically, he knew that. Guardians were never tied to their Word Speaker’s side. They were a book character that formed a strong enough bond to protect those special enough to be called Word Speakers. Just thinking about it made Dale grin. Not only did he like knowing he was special, he had the knowledge that, thanks to Ciara, he was likely the most special of them all.
It had only been two weeks since Ciara had “died”. Long enough that he wished he’d gone to bug her no less than seven times and had spent four nights in Nessa’s world learning about the merpeople. While he’d been learning how to channel all the excess power— elemental control, world walking and transportation— he’d never been without Nessa.
His gentle mermaid had become a part of him. While he’d wanted nothing more than to throw the goody-goody creature back when she’d first come through as his eleventh Guardian, he couldn’t think about a world without her. That didn’t make her the Guardian he wanted to release to fight by his side, but it made her important to him.
Dale dropped his body weight down onto the bed and cursed. “Maybe that’s why she isn’t here. Two weeks until your birthday, and not once have you openly discussed the idea of her being given the magical golden ticket.” He blew out a breath and grabbed his glasses off the nightstand.
In two weeks, he would be twenty-seven, the all-important age for a Word Speaker. Once a Word Speaker turned twenty-seven the book characters that protected them from harm and would, one day, fight alongside them in a war, became real. Prior to that, they may as well be nothing more than imaginary friends, since no one aside from Word Speakers could see Guardians. It took desire on both parties’ part, so the Guardian present at twenty-seven wouldn’t necessarily be the last. However, it would be the one that determined which side of the all-oppressing war a Word Speaker would fight on.
Being a Word Speaker had seemed pretty damn awesome to him when he was eighteen and it all had started. The idea of pulling characters from a book was the perfect solution for a friendless nerd. He hadn’t even minded the idea that, one day, he would be called upon to fight on the side of good or evil in an Apocalyptic type war.
Nine years later, he had all the powers of the most powerful Word Speaker in ages, and he was regretting it.
He’d never told Ciara, but he knew how the evil found out about the Word Speaker’s gifts. The brother that wore the leather jacket told them. That man somehow always got to them and bribed them with something, sending them out of the book in attempt to murder the Word Speaker, or in Dale’s case, cart them off to the other side of the war.
Dale’s foot tapped, and he turned to look at the clock. Twenty minutes had gone by, and all he’d done was dwell on the idea that Leather Jacket would be showing up any minute, and Nessa was nowhere to be found. Without Nessa, Dale could have trouble protecting himself while he read. Not to mention trouble protecting himself from Leather Jacket.
He almost wished they had a name for the man, like it would make him less evil to know there was something human about him besides his appearance. Leather Jacket had made it his goal to bring Dale back to the darker side of the fight; the side he’d really been on since the beginning.
Ciara had changed all that. She’d been the friend the geeky little computer programmer had needed. She’d set him straight, called him out when he was an asshole and had been the light he needed to see how wrong he was in hanging out with the evil that lurked in the pages of books. However, Nessa was the one that kept him from jumping back in league with evil. He liked the way the dark power made him feel—powerful, strong and important. The same things he felt with Ciara’s powers added to his own.
The alarm on his cell phone blared Paradise City.
10:50.
Leather Jacket would be showing up any minute. “That’s it. I’m not waiting to see what’s up with Nessa.” He didn’t bother to shut the stupid alarm off. Dale closed his eyes and focused on the cerulean blue waters that spilled up onto the white sandy beaches of the underwater world where Nessa lived.
When he opened his eyes, nothing had happened. The doorway didn’t blur and distort the world in front of him to open to Nessa’s world. He growled. He and Ciara had figured out that open doorways to the other worlds could only be done while reading or if his Guardian was from there. Picturing the place he wanted to be had always worked. Until this time.
“Fine then. Take two.” Dale chose a different world, Ciara and Stryder’s. He was deliberately reading the book as slow as humanly possible, but it meant he could only call up the locations he knew well enough to visualize.
The seedy demon bar in New Orlea
ns suddenly fuzzed into view. He saw two of the Horsemen, based on the books descriptions, sitting on the barstools and the low wattage lighting made everything look dirty. For good measure, he walked up to it and stuck his hand through. If anyone on the other side saw it, they didn’t react. Dale yanked his hand back and cursed.
“Fuck. What is going on?”
“I have the answer to that, if you’d really like to know, Dale.”
Dale’s stomach immediately flipped, and he felt queasy when he heard the voice. The brothers might be identical twins, but one sounded much more like a demon than like a human.
The one in the room with him.
In the two weeks since he’d taken Ciara’s powers, one of the two immortal brothers that paired up Word Speakers and Guardians had been visiting Dale daily. The one that wore the leather jacket, the one that liked to seduce him with the promise of darkness and the power to hurt the bullies who’d attacked him as a young man. Every day, like clockwork, the one Ciara called Leather Jacket showed up at eleven in the morning. He’d started by pushing books in his direction, and, of course, Dale wasn’t able to resist the dark horror novels he traditionally read over the fantasy ones where Nessa came from.
Hell opening up and coming to get him was an understatement. Part of the gift meant that good and evil could get out of any book that a Word Speaker read. Being that he had a kindhearted, good souled, Guardian, the ones sneaking out of the pages were as dark and deadly as they could come. Having Leather Jacket in his face was never good.
“I don’t want your help. Ever again.”
A hand came down on his shoulder, and he tensed. The man could move from space to space in the blink of an eye, and Dale hated it, even if he could do something similar thanks to Ciara.
“Now, now, be thoughtful, dear boy. I come bearing information and gifts.”
The man-creature dropped into Dale’s work chair, and Dale made a mental note to buy himself a new one. “I just said I don’t want your help.”
Fear thrummed in his veins as he worried what would happen. He had all the powers in the world, essentially, and he didn’t trust that he could take on the pure evil that was across the bedroom from him.
“How about when I point out that your precious little mermaid is no longer your Guardian?” The grin on his face was sickening.
Dale felt bile rise in his throat as he realized the man was telling the truth. He couldn’t feel anything. The blood rushing through his veins was so intense that he went numb all over. His eyes squeezed shut, a picture of the serene beach outside Nessa’s little patch of water invaded his mind.
When you open your eyes, it will be ok. There was a glitch, can powers have glitches? Dale forced his mind back to blank to the picture of his Guardian’s home, even if he already knew it was useless. He tore his eyes open and saw nothing, but the perfectly cruel smile that had been there moments before on Leather Jacket’s face.
“You see what happens when you scorn me? You’re left unaware, in the dark, and, at this very moment, unprotected.”
Dale narrowed his gaze onto the creature before him. There had been a time, a few months before, when he would have felt nothing but indifference toward this brother. Evil came in many shades, and Dale hadn’t been willing to judge this man because he didn’t know the whole story. He’d wondered since the day he’d found out there were two sides of the coin, two sides of being a Word Speaker, if both sides were being shown.
The look in the man in the leather jacket’s eyes told him everything he needed to know about the whole story. The eerie reflective eye color was devoid of anything but what Dale could only assume was evil. His lip was curved into more of a snarl than a smile, and he could see the man taking delight in Dale’s predicament. The guy in the trench coat, the so-called good brother, had given Dale a reason to live again, yet, he still hadn’t been one hundred percent ready to join that team until right then.
“Do you know the reason your brother will win?” Dale spat.
The man’s face twisted in fury, but he didn’t move to touch Dale. Supposedly, they weren’t allowed to harm their Word Speakers in any way. However, this man didn’t play by the rules.
“My brother is nothing. He lost Ciara Miller, and more recently, he lost a pathetic excuse for a man on his side as well. He’s down two players, and I’m up four.” Some of the tension in the man’s face slipped into a smirk.
Dale swallowed. He’d had no idea that more Word Speakers had been activated. In fact, prior to Ciara, they were never supposed to know about one another. He did his best to steel his gaze and focus on making the floor of his apartment rumble under the man.
“Yes, but he has me, and I have Ciara’s powers now.” Dale lifted his left hand as he spoke and a ball of fire formed in the center.
Without a thought, he sent it flying, but Leather Jacket simply grabbed the ball from the air as if it was nothing.
“My brother will lose, Dale. Not only because he is weaker, but because his side is weaker. You are weaker.”
Leather Jacket moved across the room to him, and Dale felt an invisible hand slam into his chest so hard he stumbled backward and the shaking he was doing to the floor ceased.
“You are nothing without the darkness. You have too dark a heart to use the powers Ciara gave you for the side of good, and there is nothing you can do to change that.”
The invisible hand pressed into this throat, and Dale’s eyes grew blurry. He knew he had to be clawing at the air and struggling, but it didn’t feel like it. His eyes were too heavy to keep open, and even as his lungs screamed for air, he couldn’t force his body to do anything.
As quickly as it came, the invisible hand was off his neck, and air whooshed down his throat so quickly he coughed in pain.
“You are mine, Dale. You may not realize it yet, but you aren’t strong enough to turn away from the darkness. You aren’t strong enough to be what you promised Ciara.”
His whole body was heaving from exertion and anger. Dale couldn’t manage to focus on anything, other than the words echoing over and over in his mind.
“I am more than that. I am better than that,” he spat at the man in front of him, whose only response was to chuckle.
He felt the fire begin to consume him before he had an inkling of what would occur next. The flames ignited on his skin, just as it always did, but it didn’t contain itself to the center of his palm. It licked a fast path over every inch of his body. He could see wisps of fire jumping off his arms and his legs as he looked down, and suddenly, his vision zeroed in on the only thing that mattered. The man in the leather jacket.
“I am not yours. I belong to no one but myself, and I will fight for the side I’ve chosen. My birthday is soon enough, and you will have no hold over me.”
A brief moment of fear sparked in the man’s silvery eyes as he looked Dale up and down. Then, the fear shifted into the smirk Dale was used to seeing. “The problem with that is whether you believe it or not, you are very much without a Guardian. And without a Guardian, not only can you not choose a side and unleash a warrior, you will die.”
The man was gone before the last word was fully out of his mouth, and panic took over. Dale had never been told that he would die without a Guardian, and he wasn’t like Ciara. He’d had more than one since his powers manifested, and he’d been without more than once as well. It had to be a lie meant to force him into picking the first Guardian he could find in the first book he picked up. His birthday was less than two weeks away.
For the first time since gaining his new powers, he could feel the slight burn of the fire over his skin. “You’re losing it all. You have to be,” the words were barely louder than a whisper and said through a clenched jaw.
He wasn’t who he was supposed to be when he was with Nessa. He was someone better, and without her, the man had to be right. He’d lost both people who’d made him want to be more, and if someone with godlike powers felt he was doomed, who was he to think he could rise a
bove his challenges?
Everything slammed into him once more. Every taunt as a kid, from being too fat to being too smart. The mocking combined with every punch he’d suffered for being unpopular and every lonely night he’d spent wishing he was someone else. All the Guardians that came before Nessa. All the bad choices and broken promises to himself so that he could please someone else. All the moments she’d helped him believe he could change. The spar time spent with Ciara where he was finally able to be helpful to someone outside of a computer screen. All the way up until the moment when Nessa stood by his side and he accepted something from Ciara that was greater than the sum of his parts. Trust.
The world around him turned red as his anger catapulted beyond anything he’d ever felt. Ciara had given him her trust, and he couldn’t even convince himself that the brother fighting on the side of evil wasn’t wrong about one more thing. His vision blurred as the anger overrode any sense of thought.
“Nessa. Is. Gone.” His hand rose with his sentence and fire shot off his palm in the direction he pointed, at his computer.
Nothing happened in reality. He wasn’t firing off anything that could be seen or do damage in his plane, which only pushed him that much further over the edge. Again and again, he pointed at objects and flicked his fingers until the entirety of his bedroom was burning. Flames licked up the curtains, danced over the bedspread and leapt over the computer on his desk. However, nothing burned and nothing would until he was twenty-seven. Over and over, he pushed his powers—fire, earth and air. He never touched water, never tapped into the gift that had come from Nessa before it had come from Ciara. It felt wrong to use it, and somehow, despite his angry haze, he knew that.
His body gasped for air as he pursed his lips tightly together as he launched gusts of air. Yet nothing moved. He shook the floor in his apartment, only to know that nothing was truly shaking. Nothing fell off the shelves, but his feet stumbled, since he wasn’t impervious to the plane the book characters lived on.