Guardian Angel (Psionic Pentalogy Book 5) Read online

  Adrian Howell’s PSIONIC

  Book Five

  Guardian Angel

  Book Description: Guardian Angel

  (Psionic Pentalogy, Book Five)

  Adrian Howell carries a dark secret: one that could save the world from psionic domination. But this secret must be kept even from his allies. As the Angels make their final push to end their 700-year war with the Guardians and set their sights on the rest of humanity, Adrian’s small band of freedom fighters must find its way through a maze of betrayal and deceit, and somehow restore the balance of power before it is too late. And yet, as the war approaches its tipping point, the greatest battle Adrian faces now is not one that is fought with psionics, but deep within the confines of his own scarred heart. For even in the unlikely event that Adrian succeeds in his mission, the price of victory might not only be his life, but his very soul…

  Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy

  Print Length: 312 pages

  Titles Available in the Psionic Pentalogy

  Book One: Wild-born

  Book Two: The Tower

  Book Three: Lesser Gods

  Book Four: The Quest

  Book Five: Guardian Angel

  Adrian Howell’s PSIONIC

  Book Five: Guardian Angel

  First Edition (LP.140925)

  All characters, places and events in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, real persons, living, dead or yet to be born, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Adrian Howell (pen name)

  Cover Design: Pintado ([email protected])

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or psionic, including photocopying, recording, telepathy, dreamweaving, and information storage and retrieval systems without the permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Home Sweet Jail on Wheels

  Chapter 2: The Cautious Approach

  Chapter 3: Discovery and the Fall

  Chapter 4: A Rapidly Changing World

  Chapter 5: The Heart of a Knight

  Chapter 6: The Rise of the Guardian Angels

  Chapter 7: Power and Commitment

  Chapter 8: Raider and the Phantom Train

  Chapter 9: Nonus Twenty Point Five

  Chapter 10: The Blood Runner

  Chapter 11: Matters of Trust

  Chapter 12: Deus Ex Machina

  Chapter 13: For the Love of a King

  Chapter 14: The Power of Truth

  Chapter 15: The Tipping Point

  Chapter 16: On the Far Side of Darkness

  Chapter 17: Opening the Gate

  Chapter 18: The Queen’s Reason

  Chapter 19: The Loss of Silence

  Chapter 20: Equilibrium

  Chapter 21: The Boy Who Came Home

  Afterword

  End Materials

  Introduction

  Imagine a person with a strange tattoo, eyes that don’t match in color, only one ear, and scars all over his body. A person who thinks nothing of killing people. A person who would kill his own family… who would take his own blood. And you might think, That’s not a person. That’s a monster. A person would never do that. Perhaps you’re right. But that’s the thing about monsters: the only real ones are the ones we become.

  My name is Adrian. I don’t know if I’d agree with scars “all over” my body, but the rest of it’s true. It’s also true that once, long ago, I honestly believed that I could change the course of history, if only a little. Whether or not I succeeded… well, that’s also debatable.

  I admit that the motives behind my actions were, for the most part, selfish in nature. But I swear I never wanted to become a killer. Sometimes I lie awake all night, my face hidden under my blanket, remembering the lives I have taken. Sometimes I can see their last moments even in the daylight. I may be crazy, but I do know the difference between right and wrong. I know the difference between self-defense and cold-blooded murder. I know because I have done both.

  In the end, we are all products of our environments, and I won’t ask for forgiveness for the wrongs that I’ve committed. Judge me as you see fit.

  But just remember that it could have been you.

  Chapter 1: Home Sweet Jail on Wheels

  I stopped screaming the moment my eyes snapped open. The chilly dawn light filtering through my thin curtain gently brought my senses back into the waking world. Fingering the small amethyst pendant around my neck, I carefully steadied my breathing until the memory of my nightmare faded into oblivion.

  Telekinetically sliding open the curtain, I squinted out at the deep orange sun steadily rising over the grassy fields that were rushing past my little rectangular window. The summer was officially over, October just around the corner, but it looked like we’d still have a few more mildly warm days ahead. The country road was straight for miles in both directions here, and aside from the low humming of the engine and constant, slight vibration, I could hardly tell that we were in motion.

  I gingerly stepped down from my upper bunk in the midsection of the motorhome and stretched my arms up over my head until I felt my body begin to recover from another restless night on a hard mat.

  I noticed that the lower bunk, where Alia usually slept, was empty, as was the bunk on the other side of the aisle: the one that belonged to Ed Regis. It was Ed Regis’s shift to drive, and I could pretty much guess where my sister was.

  Unaffected by my wake-up cry, James Turner was snoring up a storm on the bunk above Ed Regis’s. I quietly slipped by him and made my way to the tiny kitchen, if it could even be called that. Though I didn’t drink it, making the morning coffee was my job. So was breakfast, but that could wait a bit. It was still the crack of dawn.

  The rear bedroom door opened, and Terry, by way of greeting, said brusquely, “Coffee.” She was wearing a typical morning scowl and nothing else. My combat instructor, in addition to missing her left arm, had absolutely no sense of modesty.

  “Couple minutes,” I replied through a yawn. “Get dressed.”

  Terry disappeared back into her room.

  The coffee drinkers among us were Terry, James and Ed Regis. Alia was still on chocolate milk, and most mornings, so was I.

  While waiting for the coffee to drip, I too changed out of my nightclothes and into a dark gray shirt and a pair of navy-blue sweatpants. Psionics like myself rarely wore jeans or other clothing with metal parts since it interfered with our powers.

  Terry reappeared just as I was pouring the morning drinks. Though properly clothed this time, she was still visibly lopsided since she hadn’t strapped on either of her two left-arm attachments. After she lost her old hook at the Historian’s mountain, Terry had purchased a prosthetic hand to help her blend into crowds, and Ed Regis had fashioned a new battle-oriented hook attachment for her. Terry’s new hook was essentially a very curved, extra-sharp double-edged blade. Neither attachment was very useful on a normal day.

  Terry took her mug of coffee without so much as a please or thank you, and sat down at the miniature lounge next to the kitchen. I was used to that from her. I telekinetically levitated one more mug of coffee and two glasses of chocolate milk in front of me as I made my way to the front of the vehicle.

  Ed Regis was at the wheel, and as I expected, so was my sister. Alia, still in her nightclothes, was sitting in Ed Regis’s lap, her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and carefully keeping the big motor
home between the lines. Ed Regis, arms loosely around Alia’s stomach, was just handling the pedals.

  “Good morning,” Ed Regis said pleasantly as I passed him his coffee. “Thanks.”

  “Good morning,” I said. “Alia?”

  My sister’s concentration was such that she didn’t even glance at me. As she guided the motorhome around a gentle curve in the road, the morning sunlight glinted off the little horn on her unicorn-shaped bloodstone pendant.

  “She’s a natural,” Ed Regis informed me. “I haven’t touched the wheel for more than an hour now.”

  I placed our chocolate milks in the cup holders and plopped myself down in the front passenger seat next to them. Rolling down the window, I let the cool morning air blast my face to freshen me up.

  “Is Terry awake?” Ed Regis asked me.

  I nodded. “Yup.”

  Ed Regis gave Alia’s shoulders a squeeze. “You got this, right?”

  “I think so,” Alia mumbled uncertainly.

  “Good girl. Here, let me out. I want to talk to Terry.”

  Ed Regis set the cruise control and then carefully got out from under my sister, leaving her to handle the motorhome all by herself. Even with the power steering, cruise control and wide, empty, backcountry road, I felt that this was a bit premature. My eyes met Ed Regis’s for a moment. He gave me a slight smile and nod which I took to mean “Watch out for her.” I didn’t need telling. Pretending to be looking out the windshield at the passing scenery, I kept one eye on my sister and my telekinetic power ready to grab the steering if she lost control.

  Her focus on the road notwithstanding, Alia let out a loud yawn. Terry had suggested that we teach Alia how to drive sometime soon, and I guessed that my sister had gotten up at 2am with Ed Regis this morning. An oversized motorhome wasn’t the ideal practice vehicle for an undersized eleven-year-old, but it was all we had, and I had to admit that Alia was keeping us safely on the road. I relaxed just a little.

  Not Terry, not Ed Regis, not even Alia had mentioned my morning scream. It might not have been that loud, but they would have heard it. I woke up screaming every few days so they were used to it by now, and they knew that I didn’t want to talk about what was haunting me at night.

  After a few minutes, I asked as casually as I could, “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay, Addy,” Alia replied telepathically. “You?”

  “I’m alright,” I said quietly, giving my pendant a light tap. “I’m fine.”

  I took a sip of my chocolate milk, and Alia, catching me through the corner of her eye, said into my head, “I’m thirsty too.”

  “Keep your hands on the wheel,” I told her. “Both of them.”

  “Can’t you hold it for me for a minute?”

  “The wheel or the glass?”

  My sister thought about that for a moment. “The glass, please.”

  I levitated Alia’s glass to her mouth so she could sip her drink without using her hands. It didn’t work, and she ended up dribbling more chocolate milk down her pajama shirt than she got down her throat. Even so, Alia kept her hands firmly on the steering wheel and her eyes on the road.

  Home sweet jail on wheels. That’s what James had once called our modified motorhome, and it was an apt description. It wasn’t quite as long as a bus, but pretty big as far as motorhomes go. Terry and I had “acquired” it about five months ago, shortly after our return from the Historian’s mountain. Consequent modifications to the vehicle pretty much guaranteed that it wouldn’t be recognized by its previous owner, who, by the way, we had killed. I felt no remorse about that. He was an Angel, after all.

  In the weeks that followed, Terry and Ed Regis had gutted the main bedroom in the back and turned most of it into a storage room where we kept an ample supply of emergency rations and water in case we suddenly had to become scarce for a few weeks. They had also added a layer of steel siding all around the body that not only made us impervious to most bullets, but also helped hide my psionic power from enemy finders. Mine and my sister’s. But a little steel shielding wasn’t enough to keep us completely hidden, especially in the countryside, so we kept moving, often driving all day and all night. We never stopped for sightseeing. It made me feel like I was living in the tiger cage of a traveling circus that never actually performed.

  Our mobile jail housed five inmates. There was my obtuse combat instructor and one-armed leader, Terry Henderson. There was James Turner, the boy that we had rescued last year and later trained and took with us to the Historian. There was Major Edward Regis, former Wolf, now one of us, enough said. There was my second sister, psionic healer Alia Gifford. And me, Adrian Howell, the cook. It would have been wonderful if that was my only role here, but it wasn’t.

  Because we were on a mission.

  After being deadlocked with the Guardians for more than seven hundred years, the Angels had finally come out on top. Not only were they the single largest psionic faction on the planet, they were the last faction headed by a master controller: a powerful mind controller who could semi-permanently bend people’s loyalties to their cause. And with that power, they were growing ever more powerful as they absorbed scattered, leaderless Guardians and other, lesser psionic factions into their ranks. If left unchecked, the Angels would soon have complete control of not only the psionic world, but of people everywhere.

  Ever since I turned psionic, I had a personal stake in this conflict. My first sister, Catherine “Cat” Howell, had been abducted by the Angels when she was just ten years old. Aligning myself with the Guardians, I had made it my personal mission to find her and free her from her enslavement.

  But when I was briefly reunited with Cat at the gathering of lesser gods last year, it was at gunpoint. Cat was the one holding the gun, and she called the Angel queen’s nephew, Randal Divine, her father. Cathy Divine, as she called herself now, had found a home among the Angels in the same way that I had found my place with Cindy Gifford and the Guardians, and there was nothing I could do to bring my sister back.

  And that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

  During the gathering of lesser gods, the Guardians had succeeded in assassinating the Angels’ last known master controller, Queen Larissa Divine, and we all thought the Angels’ conversions would quickly wear off and their faction would fall apart. But that didn’t happen. Soon afterwards, the Guardians’ capital city of New Haven was brought down in a single night by a hoard of newly converted Angels who had been bound to the service of Randal Divine. Despite the conventional understanding that master controllers were always female, Cat’s adoptive father proclaimed himself the Angels’ new “king” – a legendary male master controller that appeared only once every millennium.

  The night New Haven fell, Terry, Alia and I fled the city with a crowd of lost children in tow while Cindy Gifford was taken by the Angels along with the rest of the New Haven Council, and we hadn’t seen her since. Taking refuge in the small Guardian settlement of Walnut Lane, Terry and I started giving combat training to the children we had rescued, including James, in the hope that we could use their strength to help get us to the Historian, a 3000-year-old psionic who might be able to tell us the location of Randal Divine. It didn’t work out quite as we planned it, but nevertheless this spring, with the help of some Wolves we rescued from an Angel outpost, we finally made it to the Historian’s mountain.

  But when we got there, the Historian taught me just how much the truth could hurt.

  Randal wasn’t a psionic king at all. In reality, Cat was the one doing the converting. My own sister was the Angels’ new queen, the female wild-born of a once-lost master-controller bloodline. But not even the Angels knew that. Randal was using his power as a mind-writer to make the new converts believe that he was their master. Cat was still fourteen years old, and Randal Divine, her “loving father,” was protecting her with this outrageous lie until she was old and wise enough to rule the Angels, and later the entire planet.

  And so
now I had a new mission.

  In return for his assistance, the Historian had demanded that I help restore equilibrium to the rapidly deteriorating balance of power between the Guardians and the Angels. He had asked me to put an end to my own bloodline.

  It’s a strange world we live in. A world of consequences for both action and inaction. Consider this: If you were to destroy a tyrannical government at the height of its power, you would be forever remembered as a great hero who saved millions from cruelty and oppression, but you could not bring back to life those who had already perished under the tyrant’s rule. If you could somehow kill the same tyrant before he came into power, then you would save millions more from a horrible future and no one would have to suffer, but you yourself would be nothing more than a murderer.

  I wanted to be neither hero nor villain, but master controllers were the greatest enemies of free will, and by unhappy chance my sister was the world’s last. Catherine Divine and her faction couldn’t be allowed to rule this world. Thus I had promised both the Historian and myself that I would do something absolutely horrible: I would hunt my sister down and kill her.

  And it was because Cat was my sister that I couldn’t turn away from my mission. There was no way I could let a stranger do this in my stead. As her brother, as her family, I owed it to Cat to end her life myself. I know that’s crazy. You really have to be there to fully understand it.

  The day the Historian told me that Cat was the new Angel master, I already knew what I had to do about it. But knowing and accepting are two different things, and five months later, it still gnawed at me. Out of consideration for my feelings, everyone on my team was careful never to refer to Catherine Divine as my sister. Unless we were talking about Alia, “sister” was a taboo word around here. Instead, we called Cat the “Angel master” and the “target.” I was grateful for that, but it didn’t really change who the target was. She was my own flesh and blood, and there was simply no getting around that fact.