Free The Guardian (Callista Ryan Series) by Alexandra Weiss Page A

grunt. Looking up, she saw that it was Alex who had caught her, and he was now gazing down at her with an incredulous mixture of shock and amusement.
                  She huffed, pushing to her feet once again. “Well, you would have fallen, too, if you were used to there being…oh, I don’t know, a floor when you stepped out of a door.”
                  He didn’t reply, his face betraying nothing of his thoughts. Instead, he turned on his heel and walked towards the door, about to leave.
                  “Wait!” Callie called, surprised to find that she didn’t want him to leave yet. He paused, though didn’t turn around. She approached him tentatively, not wanting to surprise him. “How did you do that?” she asked. “How did you see me falling?”
                  “Emeric has him watching you,” Shay inserted promptly. Both Callie and Alex looked towards her. Shay turned in her chair to meet their gazes without a trace of doubt on her face. She shrugged her tiny shoulders awkwardly, and Callie suspected that Shay was mimicking her in an attempt to learn a new behavior. “It is just a guess,” she continued. “But if I were Emeric, I would want to protect my investment.”
                  Callie returned her eyes to Alex’s back. She didn’t mind, for the moment, being compared to property. She didn’t mind that he had an odd habit of not speaking. She realized that this was not the first time that he had saved her, and so she murmured, “Thank you.”
                  He turned his head slightly, and she saw his profile as he looked down at the floor. He nodded in acknowledgement, and she thought that he was about to say something. He may well have, except that at that moment, a violent scream rang out through the treetops, rippling towards them.
                  Callie jumped at the sound. She had forgotten that they were not the only three people in this forest. She saw Alex jerk his head upwards, and imagined that he was searching the perimeter for the person screaming. He didn’t move, though, and Callie took that to be a sign that the person was nowhere near.
                  In a split second, Alex’s wings suddenly shot out, causing Callie to jump backwards. She watched as he stepped backwards, his enormous white wings drawing nearer, so that she was completely blocked from view to whomever might have been outside. She couldn’t see over the wings, but just then she heard a voice.
                  “Alex,” a woman called. Callie heard a flutter of air, felt the gust of a breeze. Someone was outside the door, having just flown towards them.
                  “What is it?” she heard him growl, his voice shockingly harsh. She focused on the feathers in front of her, near enough that if she simply lifted a hand now, she could reach out and touch them. They were longer than she’d expected, and appeared downy and soft. They protruded from a pucker of pink skin which ran from the bottoms of his shoulder blades to his lower ribs. The two bases of his wings never touched, leaving a bronze patch of bare skin along his spine. After that, the wings extended in graceful arches, reaching outwards as they spread in each direction.
                  “Emeric sent me,” the woman continued. “You and Shay are needed.”
                  Callie saw Alex’s back stiffen. She watched the contours of his ribs freeze into a more erect posture, his shoulders lifting with tension. Upon the play of skin, she could see the faint, pink line of a jagged scar running parallel to the base of his right wing. It was long and uneven, and Callie wondered what could have made such a mark.
                  His wings dropped, folding once more behind his back now that he sensed no threat. Callie was able to peek over his shoulder from where she stood behind him, and saw a