The Protectors: Book 1 in the Protectors Saga (16 page)

Avery gasped and leapt backwards as the two
penetrating eyes glared at her from inside the gateway. Avery stood
rigid, breathing heavily, staring back at those eyes that held her.
They were the coldest eyes Avery had ever seen, reptilian with no
emotion or humanity to be found inside of them, completely black
except for a small sliver of red running down the center. Avery
wanted to look away, but she couldn’t; she was paralyzed with
horror, and her whole body went cold.

“Aghhh!” Avery cried in pain and fell to the ground
clutching her chest.

A searing pain like nothing she had ever experienced
before raged inside her chest. Avery tore her gaze away from those
horrid eyes, and within seconds the pain began to alleviate. She
calmed her breathing down and wiped at the sweat that had begun to
form on her brow. After a moment, she risked glancing back up at
the gateway, but the eyes were gone. Avery stood up shakily, still
holding her hand to her chest, she began to massage it slowly, the
memory of the pain still fresh in her mind and her nerves.

Chapter
6

“I’m going back.” Jade told the others, getting ready
to jump back into the gateway and journey back to Earth.

“Would you stop acting like her mother!” Sasha
snapped at Jade, “She’ll get here when she gets here. Cut the cord
already!”

Jade put her hands in her pockets to stop herself
from smacking Sasha, “You know, Sasha, that mouth of yours…” Jade
was stopped from finishing her threat as Avery came tumbling out of
the gateway.

Her encounter with the eyes back on Earth had made
Avery shaky. Her legs were virtually useless when she landed on the
ground, but instead of wobbly stumbling forward flat on her face
Jade was able to catch her under her arms in time and keep her
upright.

“What the hell took you so long?” Jade asked at the
same time Avery heard her mother ask, “Are you alright?”

Avery had no intention of telling anyone what had
happened to her back on Earth, no matter how much it had shaken
her. She knew they would only worry and fuss over her and that Jade
would go on about it for weeks wanting to know every little detail.
Avery decided to mention it to Gumptin sometime later, but for
right now, she was keeping her mouth shut.

“I’m gone for like three minutes and you guys freak
out.” Avery said, trying to add a hint of levity to her voice,
“Geez, I’m not a baby, you know. I’m fine.”

Jade looked Avery over suspiciously, but allowed her
to pull away and didn’t ask any more questions about it.

With everyone lugging their bags and possessions with
them, the walk back to Havyn took a lot longer than it had the
first two times Avery had come back. This wasn’t good for Avery,
considering she spent the whole walk back thinking about the eyes
she had seen in the gateway. They had been so menacing and
terrible, but they looked at her as if they knew her. Avery
wondered whose eyes they were and why she even saw them in the
first place. Not to mention, what that pain she had felt in her
chest was. It had hurt so badly that she thought her heart had
exploded.

Eventually, they all reached the village and Avery
gratefully was able to switch her focus over to the village and
villagers.

Their parents, who actually remembered everyone,
heartily hugged their friends they hadn’t seen in sixteen years.
They shared smiles and short stories on how Earth had treated them
and what they had been doing all this time. The Protectors
patiently let their parents reunite. They could see how much their
parents had missed everyone and how happy they were to return to
the place they considered home. Avery and the rest of the
Protectors hung-back.

While letting their parents catch up, they glanced
around Havyn, their new home. They wondered which enormous tree
house were theirs, or if they lived in one of the smaller normal
houses farther in the background. Avery didn’t care where she ended
up living; she just wanted a bed and a bath before she lay right
down on the ground in front of everyone and fell asleep.

Just as she was contemplating physically pulling her
parents away, her father said, “Let’s go, Avery, time to be getting
on home.”

“About time.” Avery mumbled, shifting her heavy
duffel bag farther up her shoulder. She said goodbye to the girls
and followed her parents to her unknown house.

While the Protectors were still in earshot, Gumptin
shouted to them, “I shall see the five of you tomorrow at dawn to
start your training. We will meet by the well in the center of the
village. Do not be late!”

He then turned around and walked into the lush forest
before any on them had a chance to protest, which was a wise thing
for him to do since Avery was getting ready to pitch a fit. Avery
looked mournfully over at Jade who looked angrily back at Avery.
The last thing they had been planning for tomorrow was to be up
before dawn. Avery shook her head and continued to follow her
parents. She would worry about it tomorrow. Right now, all she
wanted was sleep.

Her parents walked diagonally across the center of
the village towards the enormous tree at the furthest left side of
the semi-circle of tree houses. The sun had almost completely set,
so Avery had to get pretty close to the tree she was about to
consider home to make out the details of it. The tree itself was a
dark deep mahogany color, with leafy heart shaped vines and rich
green moss crawling all over it. Avery could see four large
circular windows on the front of the tree, all with wooden flower
beds underneath them filled with petite yellow flowers. There were
two balconies protruding from the tree’s trunk, one on the right
side and one on the left. Both balconies had dark wooden railings
surrounded in purple flower-covered vines. There were different
sized pipes sticking out of the tree in various areas. Avery
assumed these were for stoves and ventilation. Two round stone
steps led up to the blue circular front door. On either side of the
front door was a small wooden bench. There were dozens of pots and
beds filled with Sunflowers, Carnations, Lilac, and Roses. Avery
could see that her mother’s love for flowers came about long before
she left to Earth.

To the left of the Kimball’s home were the stables.
The long building was built right on the very edge of the forest
and formed an almost barrier between the side of the forest and the
village. There were a row of hitching posts on the outside of the
stable and a wide door-less entryway which led into the interior
where the horses were kept. The outside of the building was a red
stained wood. There were four small square windows on each side of
the entryway. Avery craned her neck a little to see if she could
see any of the horses that were whinnying and snorting on the
inside, but all she could see was a back wall filled with hanging
tack and a warm orange flame from the lights. Avery sniffed the air
slightly to see if living next to a stable would prove unpleasant
for her nostrils. Luckily, as she took in a deep breath of the air
around her, all she could smell was a slight musky scent of hay and
leather, and a delicate saccharine perfume from a patch of delicate
blue flowers growing wildly around the circumference of their giant
tree house.

Avery’s father turned the oversized brass doorknob on
their blue front door and opened up the house. Avery stepped over
the threshold onto a crocheted welcome mat. The dogs had been let
off their leashes and were now bounding around the dark house with
eyes able to see in the darkness what humans could not. As the dogs
ran around their new surroundings, Avery and the rest of her family
waited on the welcome mat for her father to turn on the lights.
Eventually, one light went on, and then another, and another, until
the whole house was bathed in warm glow.

Cinder threw her pink duffel bag down on the floor,
let Romeo out of his cat cage, and began to run and romp around the
house with the three dogs. Avery took things more slowly. She
walked farther into the living room, letting her eyes absorb
everything there was to see. The walls were painted a dusty rose
and lined with multiple paintings of flowers, landscapes, castles,
and people who Avery didn’t recognize. The wooden floors were
covered with dozens of plush rugs, everyone a different color.
There were so many that Avery could barely see the actual wood
floor beneath them. A huge overstuffed blue velvet couch sat in the
middle of the room, with two comfy looking blue velvet chairs to
match on either side of it. A heavy dark oak coffee table lay in
front of the couch, covered with books and a glass chess set. There
was a large stone fireplace on the far right side of the room with
a good sized mantle hanging over it. Above the mantle was a
sizeable painting that immediately caught Avery’s eye. She walked
up to the fireplace and gazed up at the painting. It was a portrait
of Avery and her family. Avery knew the painting couldn’t have been
done too long ago since, in it, she looked relatively the same age
as she did now. In the painting Avery was wearing a white empire
waist dress with her hair pulled back. She couldn’t stop staring at
the picture of herself. Appearance wise everything about herself
and the girl in the painting were identical, but there was
something behind those green eyes that seemed foreign to Avery.
There seemed to be a sadness inside of them and a stoniness Avery
didn’t recognize. They were eyes Avery had never remembered seeing
looking back at her in the mirror every day for the past sixteen
years of her life.

Avery forced herself to stop analyzing herself. There
was a door off to the right of the fireplace, so she opened it and
looked inside. It was a study with dark green walls and leather
furniture. Avery knew it had to be her dad’s and that there was
nothing in there that would interest her, so she shut the door.

Avery could see her mother walking around the kitchen
with its red brick stove through a doorway behind the living
room.

There was a small hallway off to the right of the
kitchen, with a wooden staircase leading up to a second floor at
the beginning of it. Avery secured her bags on her back, grabbed
hold of the banister, and made her way up the stairs. The stairs
led up to a second floor landing which entered into a narrow dimly
lit hallway. The walls were wallpapered with a dark green floral
pattern and covered with small circular paintings of different farm
animals, a rooster perched atop a fence, a horse standing in a
field, cows grazing on yellow grass. To Avery’s left, at the end of
the hallway, was an extremely slim stairway leading up to a third
floor. There were three doors down the cozy hallway. One was
located at the very end of the hallway to the right, facing
outwards. For some reason Avery couldn’t quite explain, she knew
that was her room. She walked towards the round door and turned the
tarnished sliver doorknob.

The room would have been completely dark if it
weren’t for the two arched glass doors, leading out to a small
balcony, letting the moon glow flood into the room. The bright glow
allowed Avery to see the lamps attached to the bedroom walls. The
orange hues replaced the cool blue ones as she turned on the lamps
and looked about her new bedroom, which was, in actuality, her old
one.

The floors were covered with thick shaggy rugs in
shades of deep blue and purple. They looked soft and Avery couldn’t
wait to take her shoes off and run her bare feet over them. The
walls were painted a periwinkle blue and completely bare, except
for about a dozen maps nailed up around the room. Avery walked up
to one of the maps and glanced over it. It was a map of Havyn and
the surrounding forests and villages. There was writing scribbled
all over parts of it, and as Avery took a closer look she
recognized the writing as her own. She had drawn an arrow pointing
towards a dense looking spot in the woods with the words, ‘Demon
attack – February 11
^th
– Bacci Demon – defeated with
right sword strike to head’ written above it. Another arrow pointed
at a spot on a small road, which diverged off of the main road,
with ‘Ambush site – twice in one month – 4 trolls’ written next to
it. There was one scribbling that pointed towards a village named
Fallin, located about ten miles away from Havyn and half its size,
that said, ‘Battle – January 3
^rd
– Emperor’s army – 50+
strong – Sasha (broken arm) – Jade (2 broken ribs) – Myself
(stabbed through left shoulder)’.

Avery pulled her shirt down and looked at her
shoulder. There was nothing there except smooth pale skin, no mark
at all. Whatever her body had been through on Orcatia, she had been
spared the physical ramifications of it after being reborn on
Earth. In fact, the only scar Avery had on her entire body was a
small crescent shaped one under her right top rib, where she had
tripped over her dog while playing chase with her sister and fallen
onto her opened dresser drawer. Looking at the map with all its
markings about battles, ambushes, dangers, and scrimmages, Avery
realized her one small little scar would probably soon have
company. Avery decided to stop looking at the maps for now, so as
not to have nightmares of terrible beasts, and broken bones, and
stab wounds.

There was a large king sized bed in the middle of the
room, covered with a heavy dark purple bedspread and multiple
fluffy dark purple pillows. There were two blue end tables on both
sides of the bed. One had nothing on it and the other had a lamp
and book. Avery picked up the book and read the title, ‘Demon
Species of the Western Wintara Mountain Range’. Riveting, Avery
thought sarcastically, tossing the book back down on the table.

Avery walked over to the large silver painted wood
wardrobe against the far wall. She swung open its two light weight
doors to reveal the clothes inside. Tunics, bodices, vests, and
tight shirts with lace up closures hung from the wooden hangers
next to multiple pairs of pants. Avery touched the pants; they were
mostly leather and other tough materials. Avery couldn’t help but
be disappointed in her previous taste. There wasn’t one stitch of
color to be seen, everything was either brown, black, or white.
Wide belts hung from hooks on the inside of the door, and on the
inside of the other door hung a full-length mirror. Avery didn’t
much see the point of that, considering with so little variety of
outfits she probably looked the same every day. At the very end of
the wardrobe were two long dresses, one in light blue and another
in burgundy. Avery moved them to the middle, so she’d at least have
a little color to look at. The bottom of the wardrobe was lined
with a variety of boots, all different lengths. Scanning over the
inside of the wardrobe, Avery was sure she hadn’t brought enough of
her clothes from Earth. Dishearteningly, she shut the doors.