Xantera (Guardians & Monsters #1)

Chapter 1

The Choosing is tomorrow night, and I’m more desperate than ever for them to pick me.

Not because I’d get to live the rest of my life in the Blood Moon Palace and be revered from one of those ivory-wrought balconies, a symbol of our city’s continued hope and protection of the future.

Not even because I’d finally get to see what our twelve Holy Guardians look like up close—their marble skin, their crimson eyes, their pointed fangs.

No, there’s another reason I want the Guardians to choose me this time, but it’s buried so deep in my bones that I don’t allow myself to inspect it. Instead, I focus on blocking out the thing that has been tormenting me every Sunday night since the month I turned twenty-three:

The guttural sound of a man snoring.

Malcolm is my newly assigned civil partner, but neither of us have given each other more than what we’re required to in the last six months of our official union.

We share the same living space, eat dinner across the table from one another, make polite conversation, and go to sleep in our separate rooms—unless it’s Sunday, that is.

On Sunday, every couple in Xantera is required to “keep their spark alive.”

That’s what the Twelve Guardians call what I just pretended to moan through.

Now, I’m slowly shifting aside the rumpled sheets with Malcolm’s snores rattling in my eardrums and his cum drying on my thighs.

There’s no way I’m getting a wink of sleep if I stay here, and as far as I know, there aren’t any rules saying I have to let my ears bleed after keeping our spark alive.

I’m pretty sure the Twelve Guardians would want me to be bright-eyed and alert for my shift tomorrow morning.

Just as the pads of my feet touch the floor, however, the howling starts.

The noise erupts from the distance, a kind of lonely, echoing peel that scrapes through the air with jagged claws, surpassing the Wall that surrounds Xantera and settling over the city in eerie waves.

It lands on my skin, painting me in goosebumps that I can never seem to shake off no matter how many times I’ve heard them throughout my life.

Round and round the Monster prowls,

Starved for meat and bone.

Beware its eyes, resist its howl,

Stay within the stone.

If it weren’t for the nightly howling, I’d almost wonder if that childhood lullaby of ours was nothing but a silly rhyme.

If nothing prowled outside the Wall that our Twelve Guardians built for us five hundred years ago.

We certainly can’t see over the immensity of it, and nobody has gone in or out in centuries.

Well, except for the few citizens who disobey.

But that howling—it’s enough evidence for me. It definitely isn’t human, and there’s always something hungry and yearning in it that makes me want to bolt.

Instead, I continue to my room in the slowest of tiptoes, my weight creaking against the floor until I’m safe in my own cube of a room across the kitchen. Maybe I’ll give myself the pleasure that Malcolm is never able to now that I’m alone.

But I’m not alone. The howling continues, and as I fold my arms over my breasts, I can’t help but wish, once again, that I’ll be Chosen tomorrow night when the blood moon waxes.

Because beyond that secret reason buried deep in my bones, nowhere is safer than with the Guardians who vanquished the Monster in the first place.

“Good morning,” Malcolm says just before dawn, when we slide our plates onto the kitchen table and sit down opposite each other.

“Good morning,” I echo.

Breakfast today is porridge, peaches, and milk, delivered to us via a pair of graceful hands through the metal slat in our front door.

I never get to see the person who makes their rounds before sunrise, distributing even portions of food to everyone in our complex, but their hands are as familiar to me as my own.

I swallow a spoonful of porridge before dabbing at my mouth with a cloth napkin. “How did you sleep?”

“Good.” Malcolm nods, running a hand through his mousy brown hair. “You?”

“Good, thank you.”

For a few minutes, the only sounds between us are the scraping of our spoons and Malcolm’s open-mouthed chewing.

I keep wondering if he’ll ask why I wasn’t in bed with him when he woke up, but he’s staring off to the side with an absentminded expression, as if the silent, blackened screen mounted between cabinets is more interesting than me.

I make another stab at conversation.

“Did you dream about anything?”

“No. I don’t usually dream.”

“Oh, okay.”

Malcolm frowns, his gaze flitting back to me. “Do you?”

Yes. Last night I fell asleep to the sounds of those howls dragging down my eyelids and dreamt of the Wall closing in around me, tightening like a cocoon until I couldn’t breathe.

“No,” I say. “I don’t dream either.”

“Oh.”

At that moment, the screen between the cabinets lights up with a ping.

Static skates across the surface, breaking into a half-baked image of a sun rising over a grassy knoll.

The familiar female voice that has instructed every moment of my whole life rings out from the loudspeaker above the screen with the usual, “Eligible citizens of Xantera, day shift starts now. Please proceed to your duty stations, and remember to…”

“Have a good day,” I finish with her.

Malcolm has already shoveled in the last of his breakfast and jumped up, readjusting the scarlet badge pinned to his shirt before throwing his school bag over his shoulder.

He works at the Educational Institution, where he teaches twelve- to fifteen-year-olds about the history of Xantera, from when the Monster first overcame it to when the Guardians saved us five hundred years ago.

I don’t particularly envy him. To have to talk about that every day… well, that particular wedge of history is always the bloodiest.

And I know a lot about blood.

“Have a nice day,” Malcolm tells me.

“Have a…”

But the front door has already swung open and shut.

Alone now, I scoop my hair into a messy bun and tie it in a knot before checking the outline of my reflection in the fading screen to readjust my own scarlet badge—a marker of my place in life right now.

Every new couple wears one in public, an indication of the honeymoon stage.

In three years, we’ll get new green badges to specify that we’re in the family-making stage.

That we sleep together more than just on Sunday.

Not yet, though. Now, I open the middle cabinet drawer next to our screen and grab the tiny blue pill that keeps my womb empty. I’ve heard so many women in my age group complain about the medication, but me?

My mother must have dropped me on the head as an infant and failed to report it to the Guardians, because I only ever feel a surge of relief when I pop this pill into my mouth. Maybe it’s selfish of me to like the way my body feels as is, to dread those upcoming family-making years, but…

I shake my head. I shouldn’t be having these thoughts. And I definitely shouldn’t be analyzing the shape of my body in the glossy darkness of the screen, wondering why Malcolm doesn’t seem as interested in me or my appearance as I secretly crave he would be.

In our schooling phase, we’re taught a Cardinal List of Rules that becomes engraved in our psyches, and Don’t think about yourself is high up there. Number three, to be exact.

Turning away from the screen, I follow Malcolm’s footsteps out the door and into the narrow strip of space running between complexes that stare at each other like perfect mirror images.

It’s always dark in these walkways, every ounce of sunlight blocked by the metal eaves looming overhead. I quicken my pace, eyes straight ahead.

“Good morning.”

I nod at one of my neighbors as she passes, and she echoes me with a soft “good morning” of her own. Soon, I’ve made it to the light spilling from the main walkway, where streams of people do the same to everyone they pass.

Out here in the open, the sun is making a watery appearance between thin films of clouds, and the air has a fresh, clean bite to it that makes me take a large inhale through my nose.

A few birds twitter from their perches on the powerlines that run along the street, toward the Blood Moon Palace squatting on the high hill in the distance.

I let my gaze stray to that palace for a moment, its domed crown fluttering with twelve different flags. It can be seen from any vantage point within the city, like a beacon, a symbol, and an expression of all that is good here.

Still, all those ivory pillars remind me of the legs of a spider, as if the entire structure is hunched and waiting for whatever will crawl into its open mouth.

But of course, all those balconies need support, and there are a lot of balconies—space for the Chosen Ones to wave to their past friends and family during the Viewing on Sundays.

Then, they’ll lean over their designated railings, gazes sweeping over the city they were once part of, but right now the balconies are empty. Lifeless.

“Good morning,” someone says, and I jerk my head back down to nod at them.

“Good morning.”

It’s the same every day: good morning, good morning, good morning.

Briefly, I wonder if anyone has ever had a bad morning.

I continue past the other buildings that make up the spokes of our society’s ever-turning wheel: the Sentries Station, the Recreation Center, the Production Factory, the Childcare Center, the Educational Institution, and countless others that I don’t bother to glance at.

As I near my own destination, however, that feeling of suffocation, of the Wall closing in around me…

it eases ever so slightly. This is why I know the Guardians chose the right partner for me, why I had no business questioning my union with Malcolm this morning.

The Guardians know exactly what everyone needs at every phase of life.

I know so because they chose the perfect job for me.

Healing.

I smile up at the building I call home.