My Sister's a Guardian (RotG Fanfiction)

Chapter 44: What Results from It All

(Content/trigger warnings for this chapter: anxiety, mentions of family member reacting negatively to anxiety, serious self-blaming because of anxiety, children in peril)

**Isabelle**

I stomped upstairs with Ranya and Dakota, following the Guardians. When I reached the dining room, where bones were piled in the center of the floor, I glanced out the windows to make certain the Fear Angels were gone. A few of their bones littered the snowy outdoors, but no living ones rattled around.

Ranya glanced at my left palm, and I forced myself to look at its surface, too. The whole top hook had appeared; now it was three-fourths completed. I tried to glare, but my heart began to pound with a different feeling.

Dakota followed our look.

"She had to protect us with a shield," Ranya explained. Dakota's hard, stony gaze turned to the Guardians behind us.

"We didn't know about Pitch's threat before the Man in the Moon gave her the symbol," Jack stammered. "The soothing woman... made sure of that."

"Can you take it off?" Dakota said.

The Guardians shook their heads.

Dakota stuck a hand on her hip, her face now more like sharp metal than rock, but then she turned to me. "Do you have a phone?"

"No," I replied.

"If you have a problem and need my help, tell your sister, okay?"

"All right."

Dakota faced Ranya. "I'll email you my number so you can get ahold of me more easily next time."

Ranya nodded, and Dakota strode out the front door, fists clenched at her sides.

I opened my mouth to speak, but shrieking wind interrupted my would-be words. That was right...

"Could someone please go outside with me?" I asked. Bunny and Jack stepped forward. Jack's gaze was piercing. Did he blame my actions for people's deaths and paralysis like the rest of the Guardians? He'd seemed so kind and understanding before...

I slid on my coat from a hook in the hallway and opened the back door barefooted. Bunny and Jack followed me outside, our footsteps crunching in the melting gray slush that jabbed at my feet. I stepped over fallen bones and as many slush patches as I could until I'd made it to the corner of the yard, near where I thought I'd thrown the letter. The wind stung my face.

Peering through the slush and digging into snow piles with my bare fingers, I tried to find the note and cookies. I sought to remember exactly where they had landed last night, but it had been so dark. I hoped melting slush hadn't distorted the words.

My feet grew numb and prickly. Bunny and Jack trailed behind as I dug around the yard, and I stopped when I reached the thick, tangled forest, then stepped under branches as I went in and scooped around. Almost none of the leaves were green anymore, all brown and curled. So many dead things were in my neighborhood.

I still couldn't find the note and cookies. Had Mother Nature taken what I'd left, or had the wind just carried it far away, and snow buried it? Was I safe? Would she protect me from Pitch, and the Watcher, and everything else? If she had taken the note, did she agree? All my thoughts desperately searched for clues that she would come. Was the wind shrieking an affirmative message? Were there suspiciously large patches of green?

But I couldn't tell for certain if I was safe. I had to know.

Bunny and Jack a step behind me, I walked back inside.