Wilder by Christina Dodd Page B

were out searching for Charisma, and Guardian and Charisma were alone.
    Inevitably, she looked up. “Wow. Just . . . wow.” She pointed up at the ruins high in the wall. “What’s that?”
    “No one knows for sure.”
    She faced him, planted her hands on her hips, and glared.
    “Okay! This is pure speculation. It’s my theory based on nothing but gut feelings and the legends surrounding this cave. I think that long ago, a race of guardians came into the cave and made it their base. Here they lived, built homes and workplaces, and ventured out to fight the hell spawn that wander the underground.” There. He felt foolish.
    She nodded thoughtfully, and looked up again. “Sounds reasonable to me. Someone created this place, and those ruins are spectacular. How do you get up to them?”
    “You don’t.” He was firm. “There’s no way up.”
    “Really?” She considered him suspiciously. “You’ve never gone up there?”
    He grimaced and confessed, “Once. On a high ladder and with some climbing. That convinced me I never want to go back.”
    “Ghosts?”
    “I felt like I was being watched every moment.”
    She shivered. “Cool.”
    “I think whatever spells they cast, whatever protections they created are still in place. That’s why the Guardian cave is safe.”
    “Cool,” she repeated.
    Light shone down from the ceiling through skylights.
    “How do you get electricity down here?” she asked.
    “No electricity. The Belows tried to run a cable for me. Like rats, the demons chewed it through.”
    She paced into the cave, ten steps, twenty, craning her neck, trying to see everything at once. “What generates the lights?”
    “In the daytime, it’s sun.” He glanced up. “Not much more daylight now. At night, the stones themselves are phosphorescent.”
    “
Really?
No electricity? No television, no Internet? Wow.” She clasped her hands. “That sounds kind of peaceful.”
    Guardian grinned at her enthusiasm. “No Internet, but Dr. King carries a MacBook back and forth for me. He charges it on the surface, brings it down, and I use it.”
    She paused, thought hard. “Dr. King. I remember that name. You said Dr. King saved my life.”
    “He did. He’s a great guy.” For a lot of reasons.
    “But he’s the one who didn’t want me to take off the blindfold.”
    “For your own good.” Guardian carefully, tentatively asked, “After so much exertion, how do you feel?”
    “Good.” She put her palm to her chest and took a breath as if testing her lungs. “Yes. I’m good. Better.”
    Relief melted into Guardian’s bones. “Good. I want you to . . . heal.”
    “Me, too, honey.” She sounded precisely like a tough girl.
    He supposed, with the tattoos and the leather, she fit the definition of a tough girl. But he’d seen her helpless and near death, and as far as he was concerned, she was delicate and far too mortal.
    She wandered over to his desk and touched the computer. “So you watch movies and stuff?”
    “I do. But more important, and I don’t like to brag”—he had his tongue firmly in his cheek—“I’m actually quite a brilliant programmer.”
    She faced him. “If you can make coffee and know how to run a vacuum, you’re the perfect man.”
    He knew that in this light, she could really see him now. But she didn’t flinch. In fact, she seemed only slightly impressed.
    Her indifference made him stand a little taller. “I can clean the demons out of a tunnel.”
    “Close enough.” She turned back to the cave.
    Here and there furniture stood against the wall: a cupboard, groupings of chairs, and occasionally a folding screen placed to give privacy. Steep, narrow steps had been cut twenty feet up into the stone walls, leading to the alcoves carved into the rock. Up there, on one side, was Guardian’s library, with a long bookcase cluttered with a million books collected by other Guardians of other times, and a battered, broken recliner Taurean had procured for him from