The Guardian

Prologue

         Only one little girl, one hand inside her mother’s and the other clutching a melting ice cream cone, noticed the man in the shadows. She squinted a little, the sun bright in her eyes, trying to get a better glimpse of the man. He wasn’t that old, late teens or early twenties, but the haunted look on his face added years to his once youthful features. The girl shrugged, turning away as she licked her ice cream. He wasn’t that interesting, nothing special about him. How wrong she was.
         The man in the shadows dared not leave them to face the brightness of the sun that bathed the rest of the street. He hugged the darkness that lie close to the buildings. It didn’t stop the looks from them though, but it made it harder, and those looks couldn’t quite make it through the darkness without lessening just a bit. Their eyes were so full of light and they didn’t like looking through the glum. That was why he kept to the shadows.
         He glanced at the bustling street, feeling the eyes of the girl leave him. He was so hyper aware of any eyes on him, though the girl’s normal ones had almost no effect on him. A looking of longing passed over his worn features as he glanced at the girl. She didn’t notice the young woman literally hovering over her. The woman glanced up at him, the light of the sun shining through her and eyes filled with pity when she saw him.
         His breath caught when they made eye contact; like all her kind, the woman’s eyes were the brightest of blues, the color of the sky of that perfect summer day, a color not natural to a normal human. But what he couldn’t stand was the pity that filled them, pity for him. And how he hated it, not just her but all the looks he received from all of them. The woman only held his gaze for a second before breaking it; she had a job to do and even the sight of him wouldn’t distract her from it. That was the other thing he hated about them, their loyalty to their duty and how they held it above anything else including themselves.
         His eyes turned back toward the street as he shrank deeper into the shadows, trying to avoid anymore of those unnatural blue gazes. A blaring horn made him look back toward the direction the girl and her unseen protector had gone. He looked just in time to see a car screeching to a halt in the middle of the road, an older man with those same blues eyes being pushed back as he worked to stop the car, his hands splayed on the hood and using all his power to bring the metal death trap to a halt. It was a feat that no normal human could have pulled off without being hurt, but then again, this man wasn’t exactly human.
         The woman who had given him the pity look earlier, looking substantially more solid, was leaping into the air and reaching toward the little girl, who had been running across the street, licking at her last bit of ice cream, toward her mother on the other side, blissfully unaware of the car that was racing toward her. The woman reached her in mid-jump, grabbing the girl without breaking her momentum, and landed hard on her back, her young charge wrapped in her arms to prevent injury. As soon as the danger had passed though, the woman resumed her normal transparency, and the girl sunk through, landing gently on the ground.
          People had come to a stop all around the scene, their mouths open in horror from when they had seen the car speeding toward the small child. They had all been positive the girl was going to be hit, and everyone cheered at the sudden and miraculous saving of the girl. But no one had seen the woman who had pulled it off, or the man who had slowed the car enough for her to save her charge. No one but the man in the shadows.
         He gave a short, bitter laugh as all around him people chattered about what they had just seen, the word miracle on their lips. It wasn’t a miracle, in fact there was no such thing as a miracle, just someone doing their job. But of all those people, only he could see the ones that preformed these jobs of producing ‘miracles.’ No one else noticed the slightly transparent ones, sometimes walking, sometimes floating over their charge. No one else could see their strange blue eyes, the only part of them that was always solid. No one else could and ever would look about the street as he did, seeing the companions that about half the people had. He was the only one that could see them, could see the guardians.
         They called the man in the shadows Blessed, but he thought himself cursed.