Free The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) by Alexandra Weiss

perform Emeric’s bidding, often sent out to observe and manipulate events in human societies. I suppose that the terminology complicates things.”
                  “I suppose,” Callie replied with a laugh, though she understood it somewhat. “What do they do? The second kind of Guardian, I mean.”
                  “No one knows, except for Emeric and the particular protector whom he has assigned to a case. Those are Emeric’s secrets; though I must say, he makes no secret of the fact that Alex is sent away the most. This leaves one to deduce that Alex is his most trusted protector.”
                  “Well, sure,” Callie replied. “With such a sparkling personality, who wouldn’t trust him?”
                  “No, I don’t believe it has anything to do with his personality,” Shay replied seriously.
                  Callie watched Shay for a moment, waiting for some sign that she was joking. She couldn’t honestly have completely missed the sarcasm there. But Shay didn’t let on that she was joking, and so Callie shook her head with a disbelieving smile.
                  “Okay,” Callie said. She pushed up from the chair she was sitting on. “I am now exiting crazy town.”
                  “You are not in—“
                  Callie held up a hand as she walked away, silencing the correction which she knew Shay was about to make. She walked towards the door, feeling a twinge in her lower back from sleeping on the couch. She needed to walk off the stiffness in her muscles. A walk would wake her up a little; her mind was still somewhat foggy from whatever Shay had put into her drink the night before.
                  Maybe that fogginess was what caused Callie to forget about the dozens of feet between the threshold and the ground. Maybe it was simply due to the fact that she was used to stepping out of a door and landing on a solid surface. Either way, Callie stepped confidently out the door…
                  …into the fifteen stories of blank air that lie beneath her.
    Chapter Five
    Enemy Lines
     
                  Callie watched wit h horror as the ground soared up to meet her. She was spiraling downwards, her body spinning slowly even as it sank with rapid speed. She might have screamed, or been sick, or uttered a hundred different curses in the time that it took for her to plummet through those millions of miles of air. She wasn’t sure exactly.
                  But she was sure of what happened next. Suddenly, something which felt like a thick metal bar jerked her rudely out of her decent. It winded her slightly as it yanked against her stomach, pulling her upwards and away from the mossy executioner that was the forest floor. She choked, struggling to catch her breath, as she floated through the sky.
                  And then, in the next second, she saw the doorway from which she had just fallen. As she sucked desperately for breath, she managed to realize that the home she had been in for the past day or so was actually a cottage, nestled into a treetop. She had never seen anything like it; the tree trunk was made up of the same knotted cords that she’d seen from the cave yesterday, and then the branches opened on top like massive, thick petals of a flower. In that little hollow, secured on all sides by these branches, stood the sleepy cottage, built of dark wood and rope.
                  She only had a moment to observe all of this, however, before she was soaring once again through the door of the cottage, and found Shay sitting at the counter, still picking through the cubed fruit as though nothing had happened.
                  She could feel now that what she’d assumed to be a metal bar was actually a pair of arms, hugging her securely to a sturdy chest. She was dropped onto the couch, and landed with a small