Legend of the Guardians

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Book excerpt

Chapter 1

Riley Weaver drowned in her own sweat.

The air was poisoned with the foul stench of trash that spilled out of the nearby dumpsters, and the blistering heat threatened to peel the skin off her bones. Her pale face glowed a dull shade of red underneath the black hoodie, and she impatiently wiped the beads of sweat on her forehead with the back of her tattered sleeve.

Despite the scorching summer sun, Riley hid her porcelain skin in an oversized sweatshirt. It belonged to her dad, and it had “Leave It To Weaver Pool Service” written across the chest in chunky, white letters.

She passed by the front porch of an old, decaying trailer home and glared at the nine-year-old twins she had the misfortune of babysitting last summer. The pudgy boys had set her hair on fire with a blowtorch when she decided to take a nap on the old, moth-eaten couch in their living room.

She got even by whacking them on the head with a broom. They complained to their parents and in return, she got fired on the spot. She didn’t miss that job one bit. It was dangerous and underpaid, to say the least.

The twins stopped splashing around in their plastic, wading pool and greeted her with cold stares.

Riley cut through the long, narrow alley that led to her mobile home and came to an abrupt stop. Underneath a lonely palm tree, taking shelter in the cool shade, sat a group of girls that made her life miserable in Junior High.

Despite being underaged, they smoked cigarettes and guzzled down canned beer.

Riley took a deep breath, pinned her eyes to the ground and scurried along, hoping to avoid bloodshed. Their last encounter left her with a black eye and a bruised lip.

“Freak alert!” One of the girls called out.

Riley tensed up and quickened her pace.

She didn’t get too far. A huge chunk of dirt suddenly hit the back of her hooded head and halted her to an abrupt stop.

The girls howled with laughter. “Bull’s eye!” One of them screeched hysterically.

Riley clenched her hands into tight, trembling fists and whirled around. “What’s your problem?” She demanded angrily, even though her heart thumped wildly inside of her chest.

Joanna Smalls cracked her beefy knuckles and stepped forth. She was a short, fat girl with piggish eyes, a pockmarked face and a large, bulbous nose. She was merciless. Her notorious reputation for biting ears off her opponents in a fist fight earned her the nickname Tyson Jo.

She belched loudly and crushed the empty can of Bud Light before chugging it at the graffiti-scarred utility pole.

“How many times have I told you not to take this path, Weaver? It belongs to me, so now you have to pay the toll!” She snarled.

“I’m not paying a toll. Nothing in this stupid town belongs to you. When will you get that through your big, fat head?” Riley spit back indignantly, forgetting for a second that she was outnumbered, five to one.

A ripple of sinister oohs snaked through the pack. Tyson Jo pursed her chapped lips until they were barely visible.

“Looks like someone needs to get smacked down from her high horse,” Mary-Anne hissed.

Mary-Anne was a giant, paunchy girl with uneven, yellow teeth and thin, oily hair. Her nickname in school was Bloody Mary. She earned it in fifth grade when she stabbed one of the boys in the arm with a pencil because he called her Porky the Pig.

Riley swallowed hard. She told herself that she should have just kept her mouth shut and pay up Tyson Jo. Instead she signed her own death wish.

Tyson Jo quickly snatched the hood off Riley's head and revealed a mane of red curls. They fell softly around her moon-shaped face and reached down to her waist.

Riley inherited her fiery-red hair and emerald-green eyes from her missing mother. According to her dad, she was the spitting image of Caroline Belle — a woman he once loved and a mother she never knew.

Because of that, she hated her looks.

“You’re testing my patience, you little turd. Pay up or get your face smashed in!” Tyson Jo waved an angry fist in front of Riley’s face.

“I don’t have any money.”

Tyson Jo grabbed a fistful of Riley’s sweatshirt and lifted her off the ground. “Don’t pretend to be stupid, Weaver. What did I tell you last week? Next time I see you again, you better have money on you or else you’re dead meat.”

“I—I forgot!” Riley lied.

Tyson Jo dropped her on the ground. ”Hold her arms,” she told Mary-Anne.

Before Riley could protest, her arms got twisted behind her back. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” She yelled.

“You’re pissing me off, Weaver.” Tyson Jo searched through Riley’s denim pockets and fished out a wallet. “Let’s see what you have here.”

Her eyes sparkled when she came across a wrinkly twenty-dollar bill. “Well, well, well. Looks like someone was lying to me.”

“That’s mine!” Riley tried to free her arms from Mary-Anne’s viselike grip, but she was not strong enough.

“No, that’s my money! If you lie to me again Weaver, I’ll beat you to a pulp. Understand?” Tyson Jo threw the wallet on the ground and stomped on it.

Without thinking, Riley kicked Tyson Jo in the shin. She didn’t know what came over her, but when she watched the girl howl in pain, she realized what she had done. This act of stupidity would definitely earn her a black eye or worse, a broken nose.

“You little turd!” Tyson Jo swung her fist and hit Riley in the face.

Riley’s eyes rolled in the back of her head as she crumpled to the ground. Without wasting precious time, Tyson Jo leapt on top of her, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and pummeled her face with rabid punches.

Riley tried to block the punches, but her arms were pinned to the ground by Tyson Jo’s knees.

Her face ached with the intensity of a first-degree burn. It didn’t take long before blood started oozing out of her nostrils. It snaked down her chin and dripped down on the ground, pooling into a small, scarlet puddle.

The world was suddenly turning black in Riley’s eyes. She was seconds away from slipping into oblivion when something strange, and yet familiar, stirred in the pit of her stomach.

She knew that feeling. Even though she felt it long ago, it left an invisible mark. It was a dark, mysterious power that slumbered deep within her like a fiery beast, only to reveal itself in the time of need.

Tyson Jo suddenly pierced the foul air with a blood-curdling scream.

Her black tee shirt caught on fire.

“HELP ME!” She tried to beat the scarlet flames with her large, calloused hands, but they bit back.

Mary-Anne tugged the burning tee shirt off her hysterical friend and tossed it on the ground. She stomped on the flames, but they refused to surrender. Instead, they morphed together to produce a silhouette of a small, fiery cat.

The mysterious creature leapt on the horrified Tyson Jo and clawed at her face with its fiery paws.

Tyson Jo howled in pain.

“Let’s get outta here! She’s a witch!” She scrambled to her feet. She hurried down the dirt path with Mary-Anne and the rest of the girls following close behind.

Riley sat up slowly.

Her face was torn and bloody, and her right eye was swollen shut. Her body trembled from the adrenaline that pumped through her veins, but she couldn’t peel her left eye from the mysterious creature.

She has never seen this cat before.

Riley remembered the day her mysterious power came to light. Even though she was only three years old at the time, the details of that day were forever etched into the back of her mind.

The memory was old and faded, like the sepia-toned photographs her father had of his grandparents.

It was a sweltering hot summer day.

Baby Riley splashed around in the bathtub. Her mother, Caroline Belle, sat near, on a shaggy rug, and busied herself with cleaning out the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink.

She paused her humming when Riley became unnaturally quiet. She gingerly peeked inside the bathtub and gasped in horror.

Her daughter’s tiny hands were burning like a flame, and when she clapped them together, she sent sparks of reddish-orange light into the shallow water.

Caroline Belle screamed like a banshee, yanked Riley out of the tub and scrambled out of the bathroom.

She called her husband at work and begged him to come home immediately. He did. They rushed the baby to the hospital, but when they arrived, the doctor found nothing out of the ordinary.

Caroline Belle grew fearful of Riley. She pleaded with John to give her up for adoption. When he refused, she packed up her suitcase and left in the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard of again.

Riley couldn’t summon her power at will. She tried a couple of times, but failed. It’s been eleven years since she’d seen, or felt, this mysterious power. Almost as though reading her thoughts, the lithe, fiery cat wandered over to her and gently rubbed its head against her knee.

Riley reached out a trembling hand and stroked the cat’s head. Her skin tingled, but it didn’t burn. The cat purred with pleasure and continued to rub its whole body against her legs. Each time it did that, Riley could feel a wave of warmth surge through her body.

The cat looked up, its fiery red eyes taking in the dumbfounded expression on her face. Riley stopped petting it, wondering what it would do next.

Without a warning, the cat morphed back into a large, single flame and wrapped itself around her hand. Riley held her breath. Her skin didn’t burn, but it felt warm and tingly.

“What are you doing out there?” A deep, smoke-burnished voice asked, and sliced through her thoughts like a knife through soft butter.

The flames disappeared.

Riley glanced up and stared at an old, hunched woman in a floral bathrobe and with a set of curlers in her snow-white hair.

Mrs. Crow was a retired History teacher. According to the urban legend at Willcox High, she ran over a football player with her 1970s Buick Riviera because he flipped her off in the parking lot.

He lived but transferred schools soon after.

She stood at the backdoor of her run-down mobile home with a grim look on her wrinkly, weathered face and a cigarette wedged between her thin lips.

“Don't you have better things to do than dumpster diving? Get outta here, you little hooligan!” She yelled angrily.

Riley scrambled to her feet and limped towards an old, faded mobile home that she lived alone with her dad for almost ten years. She kicked open the slashed screen door.

The small, dingy living room reeked of cigarettes, beer and trash.

The sofa and the reclining chair were scarred with stains and holes. The wooden coffee table was missing a fourth leg, but it was propped up with a stack of expired cans of Spam. The TV on top of it was so old that it could barely play DVDs.

Online streaming was a foreign concept to Riley’s dad, and he didn’t care much for it.

Even though she fought long and hard with him, he refused to part with the shabby, outdated furniture. Every piece of it reminded him of Caroline Belle.

She tossed a disgusted glance around the messy room and headed down the long, narrow hallway towards the only functional bathroom in the house. The other one has been under construction for the past seven years.

Riley looked in the mirror and cringed at the sight of her bluish-black face. Her right eye resembled a squashed blueberry. Her nose was not broken, but it was swollen and covered in blood, and her lower lip was cut open.

She turned on the faucet and soaked a hand towel in cold water. Then, she gently wiped the blood off her face and heard a light knock on the door. She cast a surprised glance at the digital clock on the nightstand.

It flashed two thirty in neon-red.

Her dad worked until six. Then, he'd head over to a hole-in-the-wall bar by the name of Dirty Buck to shoot a round of darts and guzzle down beer with his buds.

He never came home before midnight.

“Back so soon, old man—?” She stopped abruptly and looked around the empty living room.

On the floor, by the open screen door, lay a snow-white envelope. She picked it up and studied the fancy, gold writing on it.

It was addressed to her.

The emblem in the top left corner was a scarlet shield, outlined in a glistening shade of gold and divided into four sections. Each section had a symbol for fire, water, air and earth.

Aditus High School was written in gold inside of a scarlet banner that wrapped around the shield.

Impatiently, she ripped open the envelope and pulled out a letter.

It read:

Aditus High School

…built on a vast pool of knowledge and bravery.

Dear Ms. Riley Weaver,

We are pleased to inform you that based on the distinctive, creative piece you had submitted to the Poetry Society last year, you have been selected to refine your unique writing skills at Aditus High School.

Unfortunately, and I deeply regret to inform you, this year the school cannot provide you with housing. However, you have been given placement at the residence of one of our esteemed members of the Youth and Progress Committee (YPC), Miss Natalie Sharp. She is eager to welcome you to San Francisco and house you for the full school term.

Enclosed is a first-class ticket to San Francisco and a student Visa.

The term begins on September 1st. The students and professors at Aditus High School are excited to meet you.

Sincerely,

Adlai Mendela

Headmistress