The Guardians (The Lost Realm Series #1)

Chapter Two: Sombody's Watching Me

                                                                          Chapter Two 

                                                              Somebody’s Watching Me

It wasn’t so much that Tristan Pierce was mad about being bested by a girl. Sometimes people were just taken by surprise. It was that for the rest of his life he would have to hear about it from his best friend, Alan.

            As if to prove him right, Alan was waiting outside the elevator when Tristan stepped into the Burrow later that night. “Took you long enough,” he said in his usual bored tone.

“I wanted to make sure I could track her down later,” he curtly replied.

Alan gave a wry grin. “I bet.”

Tristan rolled his eyes and set off down the hall. Alan followed.

To anyone else, the underground, stone walls of the Burrow may have felt foreboding, but to Tristan it was home.

“Look, if you could just keep this between yourself I would greatly appreciate it,” he told Alan as they entered the living chambers.

“Don’t bother,” a girl’s voice said from one of the blue plush sofas. “Gwen and I already know.”

Tristan could only glare at Claire Doyle as he tiredly sank into the sofa across from her. “What did he tell you?”

Claire smirked at him, her violet eyes crinkling at the corners as she met his emerald ones. “Just that you got the arrogance knocked right out of you by a Stiff, and a girl at that. Nice black eye, by the way.”

Next to Claire sat Gwyneth Wood, who only giggled.

“But that’s where I’m confused,” Tristan stood. “Why was she there?”

“Wrong place, wrong time?” Gwen asked, twirling a strand of short, gold streaked auburn hair around her finger. She stared at Tristan with wide, gold-veined hazel eyes, expectantly waiting for an explanation.

“Who?” Katherine Maddox, Tristan’s aunt and Keeper of Hawthorne asked as she came into the room. She looked as prim and put-together as always, wearing an expensive, ironed pantsuit and her strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a neat chignon. While the formal fashion might have made any other middle-aged woman appear twice their age, somehow, Katherine made it work for her.

“Just some Stiff who punched Tristan tonight,” Alan said nonchalantly.

Katherine blinked and looked at her nephew, noticing his eye for the first time. “A Stiff did that to you?!”

Tristan scowled at his so-called best friend. “There goes my remaining confidence in you,” Tristan caustically retorted. He looked at his aunt. “That Stiff has me questioning whether or not she is actually a Stiff.”

            Alan’s white brow knitted together in genuine confusion as he tried to decipher his friend’s words. “What do you mean? Of course she’s a Stiff. I saw her myself.”

            Tristan held up an index finger in rebuttal. “Had you been paying attention, my friend—or at least, had you been a Dracon, with talents as useful as mine—you would have seen her eyes right before she, er,” he coughed, “took me by surprise.”

            “Mhm,” Claire mumbled.

Tristan shot her a glare then continued, “She was able to see that Rider. Not only that, but her eyes were outlined with a rim of silver.”