Read Online The Last Guardian by Isabo Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

guardians protected something valuable. He knew their highest god had charged them with the protection of this thing and sent the guardians of it to Gehan for a period of education and training. They came in small groups, three or four, and were taught what he’d been told to teach them. But no one had revealed what it was or what threat they guarded it from.
    He could guess now the Soul Eater was the threat.
    He shook his head and stood to pace the room. If someone had told him the guardians might one day have to face the Soul Eater, he could have trained them differently, added to their education. He hissed under his breath in disgust, cursing the god so vain as to leave this vulnerability.
     
    *****
     
    Neeka watched him silently from the bed, the power in his movements, the force of his aura, filling the room. She didn’t dare interrupt him while he cursed and talked to himself. She needed his help—there was no one else who’d been alive the last time the Soul Eater was defeated. But in that quiet moment, with only the hearth fire to light the little cabin room, it was the man who fascinated her.
    Stories of Gehan came down through the tribe. An exile from his own lands, a former leader who’d made a deal with a trickster god to save his people. The deal had given him great powers, powers that had, indeed, saved his people and destroyed their enemies, but it had also turned his people against him. They feared and loathed the very power that had rescued them. That fear drove them to cast Gehan out.
    The greatest god of Neeka’s people, Baudowa, had commanded the guardians to make pilgrimages to Gehan so they might learn and protect their charge better. Every guardian came to Gehan once. Some more than once. They all talked of his isolation, how he must suffer, how he must be mad by now. If any of her fellow tribesmen had been there at that moment, watching him pace and talk to himself, they might have felt their prediction for his sanity had come to pass.
    But she saw something else in him. She had from the first moment they met. No one had told her how handsome he was, how tall and strong. No one had mentioned how courteous he could be, how caring for the lands around his cabin. No one had told her of his honor. He’d made her heart thump faster just by walking toward her. And the brief touch of his hand on her cheek in parting was a sensation she still treasured. She knew, deep in her soul, he was a good man. A man she could trust with her life.
    And that’s why she’d come to him, as much as for his power. She knew she could trust him with the ultimate secret, the secret she’d have to reveal to him before the night was out.
    When he spun to face her again, his fists clenched and unclenched in agitation. With any other man, she might have flinched backward, prepared herself for a fight. With him, she sat patiently and waited. He had to help of his own free will. If he turned her away, she would have no choice but to keep running. But if he did turn her away, she knew she would eventually fail.
    “How long have you been running?” he asked, his voice gruff.
    “I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to stop for long. At first, there were three of us.” She sucked in a shaky breath, trying not to think about what had become of the other two. “For the last few days, it’s been only me. I’ve barely kept ahead of it. My horse died of exhaustion not long after we entered the woods.”
    “You’re lucky you didn’t die of exhaustion, too.”
    “I didn’t have a choice but to keep going. And exhaustion taking my soul would have been preferable to the Soul Eater.” She shivered and set the rest of her cooling soup aside. When she glanced up, he stood next to her, so silent she hadn’t noticed him move.
    “Will you help me?” she asked, staring up into his dark eyes, eyes that seemed to drink her in.
    To her surprise, he reached out and touched her cheek, a gentle caress that made her breath hitch. The