Her Guardian's Heart by Crymsyn Hart Page A

someone grabbed my arm. I spun around and saw my Guardian half.
    “You mustn’t go in there no matter what scratches at the door or how intrigued you might be. No matter what whispers to you in your dreams. You can never open one of those doors. If you do, then you will damn us all. You will bring evil upon the clan and taint our soul. Is that something you wish?”
    “Those are the gates to Hell, then, that our clan is supposed to watch?”
    She nodded. “They are.”
    “How do you know that?” I asked.
    “Tannin showed them to me when you were unconscious.”
    “Don’t you mean when we were unconscious?”
    She shook her head. “No. You lost consciousness because our wings were going to emerge. Our body couldn’t handle it yet. Tannin was inside our mind, showed me the doors and told me never to open them. He revealed this so I could tell you because he figured the evil would eventually draw you here. Hoping to catch you uninformed now that the link between you and the rest of the clans was open. I wanted to be sure that you were aware of them.”
    “Well, that’s good to know. Thank you for the information. Wait, how is it that we can talk like this now, when all these years we haven’t been able to?” It was strange looking at my mirror image, and yet she wasn’t exactly me.
    “You’ve finally opened the door between us because you’ve been delving into our power. Now we’re able to meet face to face. It’s something I am grateful for. We have been in the dark for so long.”
    “I’m sorry. I thought that you were evil. The darkness that surrounds you is hard to ignore, and what happened with the deaths.”
    She bowed her head. “I’m sorry about that. I was only protecting us. The witches didn’t understand us. They still don’t. They will come back for us eventually. They will break the spell that we put on them. Then they will come for us to take up the mantle as high priestess. We have to be prepared for that.”
    I nodded. Eventually they would find me again. They would make sure that I paid for Eric’s death. Charles would make me his puppet and tear me away from everything I had. I didn’t want that to go away. “Yes, we do. What happened the night Nick died with the spell? I still don’t recall anything. I knew the magic was powerful. Whenever I feel out the spell, it’s a configuration that I can’t fathom. Can you tell me what happened?”
    The scratching grew louder on the doors. The whispers were tugging on my consciousness. I shook my head and pushed them out. I wasn’t going to let them get to me. But the deaths that I had caused weighed on my soul the longer that I was here.
    “I can tell you what happened. You’ve only scratched the surface to what kind of power I truly have. Combined with the power of the earth witch that you have, it makes us a formidable enemy. We’re becoming a master of the fire element. We’ve already started to feel the wind, but within the darkness and the light of our nature there is so much more. There is so much that we can pull from. The very ether of the universe. That is why it is so terrible when a Guardian turns to the darkness. What we did the night with Nick was to draw upon that very power. I wove it around us so that it’d keep us invisible to anyone who was prying with magic from the family and the coven. Anyone who meant us harm. When it’s time, the spell will weaken and we will have to confront the coven.”
    It made sense. To pull on that much power meant that something would have to break. We had to face the past and tell the family that I wasn’t going to take anything from them. I was happy in my life. I missed my mother, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my mate to do that. I had already done that with Nick.
    “I’m not ready for that. So what do we do now? The others said that we’d merge our personalities.”
    “This is the first step. Seeing one another. Accepting one another for who we are. I’ve always been there