Sanctuary

Chapter 2

The airplane dropped slightly, giving the humans around me the unpleasant sense of free fall. I kept my eyes on the window, feeling the human next to me shudder in apprehension. Or was it excitement? There was so much I didn’t understand about how people felt about airplanes. It was tough to be afraid of something that couldn’t kill me.

There are faster ways for my kind to travel, but since I was apparently involved in some sort of top secret mission, I was stuck in the mortal realm for the time being. Normally, the Guardians tried to keep their interactions with mortals to an absolute minimum – aside from the occasional summoning, I could count on one hand the number of mortal/immortal interactions in the past century, and have fingers leftover. It was partially the issue with appearances, but I suspected there was some other reason the Guardians preferred to avoid humanity. The flight from Marlene’s funeral in rural Virgina to Texas was a several hour event, not including the layover in Washington DC. That was the most unpleasant part – hours of waiting, alone with my thoughts.

I lingered on the secrecy element of my mission. If there was one emotion that described my race, it was apathy. We didn’t care about each other’s missions, we didn’t care about mortals in particular, we didn’t care about much of anything. Not anymore. The idea that other Guardians would even asking about the details of my mission boggled my mind. So why was such secrecy necessary? Why wasn’t Brady just relying on the defining personality trait of the Guardians? Why would any of them care?

The rumblings of disquiet were growing stronger in my mind, and I turned back to my research in order to focus on anything other than that sense of unease. I hated walking into a job unprepared. I scoured the news of the area surrounding Sanctuary, looking for the omens that would have tipped the Guardians off to the presence of evil.

Sanctuary, Texas. Population: 2,437. For this age, that was practically nothing. I scrolled through the search results on my laptop, looking for the most recent news stories. An hour later, my frustration was only building. Sanctuary had reported no missing people in the last several months, no mysterious deaths, no influx of lost animals. After another hour had passed, I had yet to find a single instance of crops dying in season, seismic activity, or unexplainable weather patterns. As far as I could tell, Sanctuary was the most boringly normal town on the planet. I snapped my laptop shut and folded my arms across my chest. This all-important secret mission was beginning to look more and more like a wild goose chase.

“Excuse me, miss?” An unfamiliar voice jerked me out of my daydream of smacking Brady with the flat of a sword for sending me to the middle of nowhere for no reason. I glanced to the side and realized it was my neighbor trying to get my attention.

I plastered a smile on my face and acknowledged him.

“I couldn’t help but see what you were researching. Are you visiting Sanctuary?” He asked, his expression earnest. I softened slightly; curiosity was such a human trait. After I responded affirmatively, he continued. “It’s one of my favorite places. Sanctuary is a good town. Nothing bad ever happens there. It’s always been that way,” my neighbor nodded, the wrinkles around his eyes smoothing as he rambled about the blessings of living in a small town.

Meanwhile, my grin kept spreading. See, this is what the Guardians were missing by avoiding human interaction – my new friend had just given me an inadvertent piece of the puzzle. Most towns, over the course of a century or two, would have at least one or two “bad omens.” It was the ones that were significantly above the world average that worried the Guardians, because that generally meant the presence of something bad. However, what I’d neglected to see in all of my research was how far Sanctuary was below the average. The probability of a single town surviving three hundred years without a single bad omen without some sort of supernatural help? Almost zero.