Restoration guardians of.., p.1
Restoration (Guardians of the Void, Book 1), page 1
Restoration
Guardians of the Void, Book 1
S.J. West
Contents
Books by S.J. West
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Cin d’Rella Sneak Peek
About the Author
COPYRIGHTS
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
© 2019 by S.J. West. All rights reserved.
Cover Design: Danielle Fine of Design by Definition, all rights reserved.
Interior Design & Formatting: Stephany Wallace @ S.W. Creative Publishing co, all rights reserved.
Proof Reader: Allisyn Ma.
Published by Watchers Publishing November, 2019.
www.Sjwest.com
BOOKS IN THE WATCHER SERIES
The Watchers Trilogy
Cursed
Blessed
Forgiven
* * *
The Watcher Chronicles
Broken
Kindred
Oblivion
Ascension
* * *
Caylin’s Story
Timeless
Devoted
Aiden’s Story
* * *
The Alternate Earth Series
Cataclysm
Uprising
Judgment
* * *
The Redemption Series
Malcolm
Anna
Lucifer
Redemption
* * *
The Dominion Series
Awakening
Reckoning
Enduring
* * *
The Everlasting Fire Series
War Angel
Between Worlds
Shattered Souls
* * *
Lucifer and Amalie's Story
Surrendering the Dark
Descending into the Abyss
* * *
Guardians of the Void
Restoration
OTHER BOOKS BY S.J. WEST
The Harvester of Light Trilogy
Harvester
Hope
Dawn
* * *
The Vankara Saga
Vankara
Dragon Alliance
War of Atonement
* * *
Vampire Conclave Series
Moonshade
Sentinel
Conclave
Requiem
* * *
Circle of the Rose Chronicles
Cin D’Rella and the Water of Life
Cin D’Rella and the Golden Apple
Cin D’Rella and the Lonely Tower.
Cin d'Rella and the Messengers of Death.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who were with me throughout this creative process; to all those who provided support, talked things over, read, wrote, offered comments, allowed me to quote their remarks and assisted in the editing, proofreading and design.
I would like to thank Lisa Fejeran, Erica Croyle, Misti Monen, Hollian Rickman, Barb Todaro, Keryn Aikman, and Nicoll Edwards, my beta readers, for helping me in the process with invaluable feedback.
Thanks to Allisyn Ma, my editor for helping me find typos, correct commas and tweak the little details that have help this book become my perfect vision. Thank you to Stephany Wallace for creating the Interior Design of the books and formatting them.
Last and not least: I want to thank my family, who supported and encouraged me in this journey.
I apologize to those who have been with me over the course of the years and whose names I have failed to mention.
A quiet whisper of a promise…
Safety…Black Castle…find us
The caress of something foreign yet soft brushes against my cheek, and an ethereal silhouette of an angel flies past a glaring red sun. Those are the first things I remember, if they are memories at all. Maybe I simply dreamed them, an imagined promise of hope, meant to keep me sane in the living nightmare I find myself in now.
My heart trembles at the sight of the arid landscape surrounding me. I raise my right hand to shade my eyes from the blinding rays of the sun as I attempt to get my bearings. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people are scattered across the flat, cracked wasteland we stand on. The only sound is my labored breathing as the warmth of the air burns my lungs. No one around me says a word, and I sense that the others are in the same boat as me. I don’t know how I got here, but I also don’t know where I came from. I raise my other hand to touch my face. What do I look like? Smooth skin. High cheekbones. Full lips. Slim nose. I reach for a handful of my hair and pull the strands off to the side so I can see them. Long, dark brown hair. That’s all I know about myself.
Wait…
There’s one more thing.
My name: Lilith.
A chorus of screams off to the right instantly draws my attention. The strangers there are running like a pack of wild animals in my direction. All of them wear the same terrorized expression on their face. I squint my eyes, trying to see what has them so frightened. A blonde woman wearing a white dress captures my attention because of the look of utter terror on her face and the way her dress floats around her legs like a cloud. Over her left shoulder rises a massive head of an oversized white wolf with blazing fur and soulless black eyes. It clamps its razor sharp teeth into her neck. As blood drips down her chest, fear wraps its cold hand around my heart and yanks, urging me to run for my life.
Before my brain can tell my legs to move, one of the men running past me roughly grabs me by the arm. I wince slightly from his grip, but it jars my brain back into reality.
“Run!” the stranger screams, tugging me along with him. The man is at least a head taller than me with light brown hair and hazel eyes. His plain white T-shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes are coated in a thin layer of desert dust.
I turn to follow the man and see where it is everyone else is scrambling to reach. Half a mile ahead of us is a city with tall buildings made of metal and glass. I have no idea if the place is safe or not, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter. If nothing else, it will provide a place to hide from the creatures attacking the people behind me. I hear their screams but don’t take the time to glance over my shoulder. If I do, I fear I’ll stumble and seal my fate.
“What the hell are those things?” the man who urged me to run asks as our frantic strides keep us side by side.
“I don’t know.” I keep my answer short because every breath I take stings. As we run across the cracked earth, the sweltering heat makes me feel like I’m trapped inside an oven. Sweat burns my eyes as it drips down from my forehead. I quickly wipe my brow, struggling to see.
The stranger and I continue to run as if our lives depend on it, which is likely the case, considering all of the screams of impending death I hear all around me. I want to help the people behind us, but I can’t make myself stop running. My survival instincts won’t let me, because if I stop, I’m as good as dead. I have nothing but my bare hands to fend off the creatures chasing us, and without a deadlier weapon, there’s no way I can kill the wolf-like beasts at our backs.
As we approach the city’s outer edge, we’re welcomed by the blissfully cool shade provided by the long shadows of the towering skyscrapers. The crowd in front of me converges between two buildings directly in front of us and funnels onto an empty street. The sight makes me stop in my tracks. I almost fall down as the people running by jostle me as they pass. The man I was running with notices my absence from his side. He turns around to face me.
“Come on!” he screams at me with an urgent swing of his arm in the direction of the street everyone is running toward. “What’s wrong with you?”
I don’t take time to explain. I run toward the stranger and grab his arm.
“Follow me!” I say, pulling him behind me and off to the side of the crowd.
He doesn’t question my change in direction. Maybe he understands why I don’t want to be a lemming in this particular situation. We run around the other side of the building in front of us to a street that’s parallel to the one everyone else is running toward. I chance a look behind me and notice that none of the giant wolves are following us. They seem intent on pushing the crowd of people forward onto the other street.
“In here!” the man says to me as he pulls the glass door of the building open for me to run into. Once I’m inside, the man follows, letting the door swing closed on its own. I bend over, resting my hands on my knees as I try to catch my breath with the cool, sweet air inside the building.
“We need to go up one of these elevators,” the man
“Why?” I stand up to my full height and follow after him.
“As long as those wolf things can’t push a button,” he says over his shoulder as he continues walking, “we should be safe on a higher floor.”
Of course, he’s right. I should have thought of that. As I catch up to him, he pushes a call button on the wall between two of the elevators.
I look back toward the glass door we just came through, but I don’t see anyone or anything following us. The steel doors of the middle elevator car slide open. After we both step inside, the man pushes the button for the top floor of the building.
When the doors close, soft classical music begins to come out of the speakers in the ceiling, making the moment even more surreal.
“I don’t suppose you happen to know where the hell we are?” the man asks with limited hope. He turns his head to look at me as he waits for my answer.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I tell him. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
The skin between his eyebrows bunches up as confusion enters his eyes. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows hard.
“I don’t remember anything before the last few minutes. You?” His hopeful expression makes my answer harder to say.
“I don’t remember anything either.” I look ahead at my slightly warped reflection in the metal doors in front of us. I’m young. Possibly twenty-two but no older than twenty-five. “I didn’t even know what I looked like before now.”
The man’s eyes follow my gaze as he studies his own reflection.
“Me neither,” he whispers. He turns his head from one side to the other as he looks at himself.
“I know my name,” I say like it’s a small, yet significant triumph. I hold out my hand to him. He reacts to the social cue by shaking it. “My name is Lilith. What’s yours?”
“Phoenix Kane,” he tells me, even though he looks uncertain about it.
“Why don’t you look sure about that?” I lower my hand back to my side.
“I get the feeling most people just call me Kane,” he says, sounding more confident about his name. “I’m not sure how I know that, but I do.”
“Well, Kane,” I say as the elevator continues its ascent, “what do you think is going on here? Are we dreaming? Or inside some sort of twisted social experiment?”
“Honestly?” he says, scratching the side of his head. “Considering what we just saw, I’m beginning to wonder if this is Hell.”
Kane’s guess makes me lose my breath.
“You think we’re dead?” I ask. After he nods, I reach out and pinch him hard on the arm.
“Ow!” Kane reaches up and rubs the spot on his bicep where I squeezed him. “What was that for?”
“I was checking to see if you’re alive,” I say unapologetically.
“Well, that felt real. I’m pretty sure I’ll bruise.” Kane raises the sleeve of his T-shirt to examine the spot and finds something else besides a patch of reddening skin on his arm.
“What is that? A tattoo?” I lean over to get a closer look at his arm. Etched with black ink, a phoenix stretches its wings over its head and the word “Hope” floats between them.
“Hope,” Kane says while staring at the tattoo on his arm.
“Does that mean anything to you?” I ask. Kane shakes his head, looking bewildered by the word’s presence. “Well, maybe you’re a very optimistic person. Or it’s the name of someone special to you.”
Kane lets his sleeve fall back into place. “I don’t feel very hopeful about our situation, so my money is on the name option, even though it doesn’t ring a bell at all.”
The elevator finally comes to a stop, and the doors slide open.
“Let me go out first,” Kane says to me. “If something is on this floor, I’d rather have it attack me.”
“How gallant of you,” I say. “You’re obviously not a selfish person.”
“Or I’m a complete idiot,” he jokes while he cautiously pokes his head out the doors to look on either side of us. “Keep your finger on the second-floor button in case you need to push it quickly to get away.” Kane takes in a deep breath to steady his nerves. “Here goes nothing.”
Kane swiftly steps out of the elevator and whips his head from left to right. From my vantage point, it looks like this level is unfinished with bare cement floors and colorful wires hanging from the ceiling. It’s completely empty—not even a stick of furniture in sight. Straight ahead of us is the outer glass wall of the building, which gives us an excellent view of the rest of the city.
“Do you see anything?” I whisper in case there is something lurking outside my safety zone.
He shakes his head. “No, but I can only see half the space. Stay here while I check the rest of the floor out.”
Kane walks away, and I almost call him back. I don’t want to be alone in this strange city we find ourselves in. If I’m going to survive, I need at least one ally, and Kane seems to be fairly trustworthy. He isn’t giving me stranger-danger vibes, and we have a common goal: to stay alive.
“Oh my God!” he yells, but it’s not out of fright. His tone sounded more like shock than anything else.
“Are you okay?” I shout out, keeping my finger poised over the button with the number two on it in case Kane is making a hasty retreat back from whatever it is he sees.
I hear Kane’s boots run across the cement floor before I see him appear outside the elevator.
His eyes look frantic.
“How did you know we needed to turn away from where everyone else was running?” he asks me.
“I just had a feeling that it might be dangerous to follow everyone else,” I say since it was a gut reaction. “Why do you ask? What have you seen?”
Kane holds his hand out for me to take. “Come see for yourself because I really don’t know how to explain what’s happening.”
I move away from the elevator’s control panel and accept his hand, stepping out onto the floor. The elevator doors close behind me, and Kane lets go of my hand. As we walk side by side over to the glass wall facing the street, I fear what I’ll see when I look down at the people below. When I reach the wall, I attempt to trap my fear in a steel cage as I peer out the window. The sight that welcomes me causes a scream to become trapped in my throat.
Chaos and horror. Those are the only two words that come to mind as I view the carnage that’s happening right below us. A mammoth creature beyond anything my mind could conjure hovers just above the street. Its body reminds me of a blood-filled tick. Through its semi-transparent skin, I can see the floating bodies of those who have fallen victim to its ravenous appetite slowly being dissolved by an acidic substance. The monster’s gaping maw is stretched wide to swoop up the panicked crowd of people being led into it like lambs to the slaughter by the large wolf pack at their backs.
“Those poor people.” I raise both my hands to my mouth as tears mercifully blur my vision.
“If you hadn’t pulled me off to the side with you, I would be down there with them,” Kane says. His eyes look transfixed by the brutality until he shakes his head to break the spell.
“I think you might be right,” I tell him, wiping at the tears that freely stream down my face. “I think we are in…”
Before I’m able to finish my sentence, a blinding flash of white lightning strikes the creature consuming the people in the street. The beast rears back its ugly head as it screams out in agony and flops uncontrollably like a live fish in a frying pan. The force of its shrieking is so powerful that it rattles the glass in front of us in its casing. Two more jagged streaks of lightning simultaneously impale the center of the beast. The combined energy pierces its flesh and sets the creature on fire. In only a few seconds, it turns into black ash right before our eyes. The wolf-like beings scatter in fright like dust in the wind.
