Sweet Romance17 min read
My Three Beast Guardians: The Inherited Promise
ButterPicks14 views
I remember the smell of the old house before the words did.
"Grandma," I said, kneeling by the bed as if proximity could pull her back from somewhere far and thin, "what are you saying? A qilin? Three beasts? Stop being silly."
She smiled in a way that made the skin on my hands prickle. "Eleanor," she said softly, "you were born with them. I only waited to tell you until I could not wait any longer."
The white cat on the windowsill blinked at me, utterly ordinary except for how it watched the bag in my lap—the bag that still smelled faintly of the city bus, of paperbacks, of a life I had not yet lived.
"You can't be serious," I told the cat, because saying it to the cat felt safer than saying it to my grandmother.
The cat yawned and pushed its small head under my chin. "I am serious," it said in a tone so small I almost missed it. "You are my owner. Let me show you."
Gold light uncurled from the cat like smoke and the room disappeared.
When the world returned, the white cat belonged to the floorboards no more. Standing where it had been was a creature with a mane like soft snow and antlers with veins of light. It roared in a way that made the teacups tremble.
"I... fainted," I told the room when I woke, clutching for a hand. "I fainted and dreamed."
Grandma's hand was cool and light. "Hush. She is Kylin," she said. "She is yours. Take her to the city. Find the others."
"Others?"
"Three. Pixiu. Nine-tailed fox. Azure dragon." Grandma's eyes closed for a beat. "You were bound at birth. Guardians do not always stay where they belong."
The next morning she did not wake.
I read the funeral papers and the same line: last wishes. "Find the beasts," she had said in the note under her handwriting, "and remember what a guardian is for."
"Grandma," I said at the grave, "I don't even know how to be a normal person in the city."
The white cat, back to being content and small, hopped on my shoulder, cold and weightless. "You will learn," Kylin said. "We will make sure you do."
I moved to the city with a suitcase and two borrowed dresses. Aunt Felicity Teixeira greeted me at the train station with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, and my cousin Joelle Rice preened behind her like a scented shadow.
"You'll stay with my sister," Aunt Felicity said. "City schools are better. Try not to embarrass us."
"Embarrass?" Joelle's tone was cotton and knives. "You better not make me look bad."
I swallowed. "I won't," I lied.
On the first weekend I took Kylin to the center of the city because Kylin's ears had told it a story no alley cat should ever tell.
"I feel Pixiu," Kylin yawned. "Up high. A building. Money smells like metal and silk. He is bored."
"I'll try," I said, and walked toward the tower that scraped the blue.
At the lobby the receptionist adjusted her smile when she saw me. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked.
"No," I answered. "I need to see the chairman."
Joelle happened to glide in like she always did—careful shoes, perfect lips. She pointed at me with glossy disdain. "What are you doing here?" she asked. "Trying to climb the ladder by tricking people?"
"I was invited," I heard myself say, ridiculous even as the words left my mouth.
"Liar," Joelle snapped. "You don't belong here."
The receptionist frowned. "We need an appointment. Security—"
"Excuse me." The crowd parted like the sea. He was tall, his suit cut like law. He had a face that fitted magazines, and his nameplate on the reception desk read Cameron Howell, Chairman.
He stood where doors closed around him and he looked at me as if I had just made the most natural request in the world.
"Please," I blurted, seeing Kylin's quiet judgment. "Mr. Howell, please—"
Cameron crossed the room in three steps. "Eleanor," he said, and for a moment I didn't know him, because how did a billionaire know my name?
Then he dropped to one knee so fast it stole all the oxygen from the room.
"Master," he said, and the floor hummed.
The receptionist made a sound like a swallowed scream. Joelle's phone clicked as she took a picture without thinking. "What is happening?" she hissed.
I had been raised to meet life with the kind of practical stiffness only children of small towns understand. I put my hand on his shoulder and hauled him up.
"Don't," I said. "Don't make a spectacle."
He smiled as if making a spectacle were the most reasonable thing a person could do. "You are my owner. I will kneel if it pleases you."
"Pixiu?" Kylin murmured in my ear. "He will lavish you with everything. He is very talented at being loud."
Cameron Howell moved as if he had never known silence. "A flat for you," he said the next day. "Black card. Call me if you need anything."
He made me laugh and blush in ways I had thought I had left behind. "You don't have to do that."
"I like being useful," Cameron said. "And I like being near you."
"Fine," I told him. "Just... don't make it obvious."
"It will be impossible."
I started school with new shoes and a borrowed confidence. Joelle and Aunt Felicity watched with a mixture of scorn and hunger. "She's our cousin," Joelle said to the girls who clustered in a ring outside the classroom. "Don't be fooled. She just got lucky."
Luck has a way of wearing thin when it shows its teeth.
When Maverick Bowen walked through our gates the school shook.
"Is that...?" Susannah squealed.
He was a thin flare of color and every girl in the courtyard curved toward him. He wore sunglasses like small moons and walked like the world was an instrument he had learned to play.
"I heard Maverick's coming," one girl whispered. "He has come to do a surprise for students."
A voice from the sea of phones. "Please, Eleanor Daniels—step forward," Maverick said, laughing into a megaphone.
"Why me?" I wondered out loud.
He abandoned the megaphone and pushed through the crowd. He ignored the screams. He ignored the cameras. "You," he said, catching my hand and then dropping to his knee.
"Master," he said, and the word stopped the air.
Kylin purred against my neck. "Fox," she murmured. "Maverick is nine-tailed and will charm the whole world. He is show enough to make the night jealous."
Maverick and Cameron became loud, polite satellites in my orbit. They both called me Master in the private places where names matter most. They both made impossible promises to small-town me: apartments, dresses, public affection. They both led me like lanterns.
At school someone wrote on the confession wall: "Silas, I like you. Eleanor." Someone else took a spray can and wrote my name under it. It was nonsense and it became a storm.
"Who did that?" Joelle demanded, fingers trembling with anger.
"It wasn't me," I said.
"Then who?"
The answer was the boy who owned the look of a lockdown: Silas White. He was tall, too sharp in a way that made teachers worry. He was a leader who led because people let him. He walked into the class and froze at my word.
"Wait," I said without thinking—"sit down."
He did. The entire class bent like grass in wind.
"Stand up," I said an hour later.
He did. The words I said were not magic I had learned. They were something else, less showy than the feline roar or the fox's song. Kylin told me what it was.
"That is your speech," she said, as if tasting a lemon. "The words you command are binding. Do not be careless."
"Why me?" I asked Kylin.
"Because you were chosen," she said. "Do not waste it."
Silas—my azure dragon—had been hiding in plain sight. I learned how he could be both storm and calm at once. When I told him to protect a girl on the playground, he did; when I asked him to stop a fight, he did. He was stubborn as a river and gentle in a way that made me catch my breath.
"Why would a dragon like you take orders?" I asked him once.
"Because you are my home," he said. "Because you are small enough to hold."
My cousin's smirks hardened into schemes. Joelle and Aunt Felicity did not like that the world had changed its map and left them on the edges.
"You think you can come here and collect treasure?" Joelle hissed to the girl's circle one day. "We will show her what it is to be embarrassed. We will make her leave."
"I could," Aunt Felicity said to Joelle later, when night pressed against the window, "ask someone who knows how to move things. Who can make a man disappear from a construction site. Who can make accidents happen."
One white lie at a time leads people into holes.
They found Ace Moreau through a whispered list of men who could "move luck." Ace Moreau had a goat-flecked beard and the smell of stale incense. He called himself a master of talismans and spoke in low jokes that made Joelle blanch at the cost.
"Five thousand dollars," he said, thin as the paper he folded. "There is a way. A small fright. Nothing too permanent."
Aunt Felicity rumbled like a kettle. "If this gets James out of the picture, my life will begin again," she told him.
James—my uncle—had been the man who slammed buckets of cement and came home smelling of dust. He had been my father's brother, and he had cried once over the photo of my father. He did not deserve the plan Aunt Felicity outlined like a dessert menu.
I should have told someone. I should have gone to Cameron and said: "Watch him." I could have told Maverick: "Look for patterns." I did not. I trusted my small-town belief that wounds could close and money would fix whatever bled.
When my uncle nearly fell from scaffolding the whole street cried.
"How did this happen?" I demanded at the hospital door, fists raw.
"It was a mishap," Aunt Felicity lied. "He slipped. The board was wet."
But Silas's eyes grew dark. "This wasn't an accident," he said. "The pattern of hands, the loosened rope—this was arranged."
"We will find them," Cameron said, his jaw like steel. "We will make this right."
Cameron did not mean the law. He meant the slow, public removal of power from the people who thought themselves untouchable. Maverick meant cameras. Silas meant presence. Kylin meant a small, merciless cold behind the ears.
We did not wait for the police to make us slow. We prepared in a way that made the city lean in.
"Where will we start?" I asked.
"At the point of their greatest vanity," Maverick said. "At Joelle's birthday."
She had been planning to make the display of designer labels into a shrine. The plan was simple: we would go to the mall where Joelle was sure to make her mother's purchases into conversation. We would let cameras and light show the truth.
"Are you saying we will put them on stage?" I asked.
"We will make them visible," Cameron answered. "Let them be seen by everyone who came to gawk."
The day of the birthday the mall smelled of hot coffee and perfume. Joelle and Aunt Felicity walked into the store like queens, shoulders straight, mouths dry. They flaunted the credit cards of men who were not their husbands and the currency of bitter pride.
"Look at me," Joelle said, lifting a bag the size of her head. "I am finally...someone."
Aunt Felicity laughed, and the sound was like a trap closing.
We stood in the invisible wings of the scene. Cameron had arranged for a charity ribbon-cutting event to coincide with Joelle's shopping. The stage below their heels was the kind of stage that television crews savor.
"Everything is set," Maverick said into my ear. "When we start, stay calm."
I squeezed his hand. "What will you say?"
"Only the truth," he said. "It sings like glass."
The lights went up like an inhale. Cameras blinked. The mall's central atrium swelled with a crowd that came for shopping bargains but stayed because spectacle was a magnet.
Maverick stood in the middle of the stage with a microphone that tasted like sea. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, and his voice corked the air. "We are here today for a ribbon-cutting and something else."
Joelle laughed, because the world had taught her laughter is a shield.
Aunt Felicity stood a step behind her, hands clenched in the fabric of her purse.
"Joelle Rice," Maverick said, and everyone turned, "you have been an uninvited actress in a crime."
The crowd's hum went quiet.
"What do you mean?" Joelle snapped.
"Do you know what happened to James Farrell's scaffolding?" Maverick asked.
Joelle's face lost color. "What—"
At the same moment Cameron's assistant triggered the images on the mall's giant screen. Photos and audio—recordings of meetings with Ace Moreau, transaction receipts, messages—filled the glass. Ace's oily smile was there like a bad coin that could not be spent.
"No," Aunt Felicity said. "This is a mistake."
"Is it?" Cameron asked. "Ace Moreau, step forward."
Ace Moreau's face, which had been a shadow at the edge of Joelle's plans, was now a face under the lights. He tried to thread himself into invisibility, but there is no hiding when someone brings the sun to a mall.
"Do you deny this?" Cameron asked, and the microphone made Ace's voice a mouse inside a box.
"It was for money," Ace said, like a coin that had been dropped and could not be rolled back. "They asked—"
"They hired you to cause our family harm," Maverick finished, and the recorded messages played in one cruelly patient loop: Ace bargaining, Joelle pressing, Aunt Felicity promising. The crowd listened like a living jury.
"This is slander!" Joelle cried, thrusting her chin as if by holding it high she could break the sound.
But the evidence had weight. People do not roar at ghosts. They roar at the tangible.
I stood still as the crowd bent toward us like a compass. Silas remained beside me, the only person not flinching. His dragon eyes were a steady burn.
Ace's denial collapsed like old bread. He pivoted through stages as fast as a child's mood: defiance, incredulity, fear, then the small, naked plea of someone who had no more tricks.
"Please," he said, hands trembling. "I can fix this. I can undo—"
"You can't undo your words," Cameron said. "They are recorded. You can't take back the signatures."
"Public apology," a wave of cameras hissed, and the crowd demanded spectacle, hungry for the wrong to be seen made right.
Ace's face crumpled. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry—" he said, and the cameras circled him like vultures.
Joelle fell under the weight of her own choices. People who had once bought into her smooth lines now saw the cord that tied her to Ace's palms. The first reaction was a gasp; then came the phones. A hundred lenses captured her fingertip trembling on a handbag strap. Bystanders whispered into microphones for the feeds: "She was behind it? I didn't expect—"
Aunt Felicity's expression cracked into a mask and then into the rawness of being seen. "I didn't know it would go this far," she said, but words are thin when everything you have bought unravels in the light.
The crowd's reaction was a living thing. Some cheered for justice. Some hissed at the cruelty of exposure. A few people clapped like judges scoring a performance. A girl from school who had dreaded Joelle now stared at her like an enemy who had finally bared teeth.
Joelle's voice rose in defense and then diminished into pleading. She tried to strike bargains—"I can return the money!"—but the evidence did not care for bargains. It had a ledger instead.
At one point she lunged for the screen and the security guards closed like springs. People shouted. A man in a suit whispered into his phone: "Get legal. Get statements."
Ace's eyes met mine for two seconds. In them I saw more than panic. I saw someone who had finally understood the shape of a consequence.
"Please," he said. "Don't—please."
He nearly buckled to his knees, hands up. "I've done wrong. I'm sorry."
The crowd's clamor did not relent. Phones rose like candles. Joelle, red-faced, shouted for her mother and for the man who had promised more than him, but no one gave them the light. They gave them the light of being watched.
It would have been enough for the law, but our hunger was not only for legal justice. We wanted them to feel what they had set into motion; we wanted to find the hollow place where arrogance first grew and show it to them.
"What do you want?" Joelle screamed. "How dare you—"
Cameron walked to the center of the stage. "We want them to see themselves," he said. "We want their future to be measured against the truth."
"Do you want forgiveness?" Maverick asked, voice soft like a curtain falling.
"Yes, yes, I—" Aunt Felicity began.
"You will apologize," Cameron said. "In public. Names. Details."
Aunt Felicity's throat worked. "I—I'm sorry," she said, voice smaller than I had thought possible. "I... I'm sorry to James. I'm sorry to everyone."
Joelle's face was taut as a drum. "I'm sorry," she said, like a prayer that could not reach anywhere. "I'm sorry for everything."
Ace's reaction was worse. "No! Please!" he cried, looking around for a crack. He had routed his usual arrogance into a plea. It did not play well.
The cameras ate them up. The crowd's reaction moved through a spectrum: derision, triumph, sorrow, boredom. People recorded the apology and then uploaded it. Within hours the footage would travel on every platform, a small comet of their downfall.
This was public. This was unignorable. This was the kind of punishment that felt both trivial and heavy—the punishing weight of being seen.
But the punishment did not end with humiliation. The rituals Ace trafficked in were not harmless; they had consequences. The recordings we had were not only about contracts and money. They were about the man who had signed another contract to spread the harm.
Cameron stepped back and whispered to Maverick. Maverick's phone sent one message, and the mall's central sound system flickered.
"Your contracts," Cameron said, not loudly but in a tone that made everything shrink, "are public record now."
At that, the air around Ace shuddered like heat above asphalt. He tried to move, but his joints stalled like a puppet with severed string. People gasped.
"You're all going to see what the cost is for borrowing what is not yours," Cameron said.
The sound of old incantations—Ace's own words—came back as if echoing through the speakers. He clutched at his throat, then to his face. The color drained and his knees hit tile.
"I didn't mean—" he choked. Blood flecked his lips. He had tried to spread harm and then make someone else absorb it. Magic has a terrible arithmetic.
Joelle made a noise like someone choking on a secret. "What is happening?" she cried.
On the stage, a hundred witnesses leaned forward. A woman raised a phone and said, "Someone call an ambulance," and a man added, "That's what you get for using people."
I watched Aunt Felicity's face fold in on itself, her breath coming quick and shallow. Her new life did not arrive like a promised sun. It vanished like steam.
"You used him to hurt a man," Silas said quietly, so quiet that only I heard. "Now you'll share."
The retribution was public. The crowd watched the men who had shaped lives into tools shuffle beneath the weight of the consequences. Security framed them and carried Ace away. Joelle and Aunt Felicity were escorted, faces white with the taste of salt and fear. People surrounded them, whispering and pointing.
Cameras flashed like a terrible benediction. Comments rolled in under live streams: "Serves them right," "Justice," "How dare they."
Joelle tried to get angry. "This is a set-up!" she screamed.
"You hired someone to cause an accident," Maverick said. "You made a pact to shift pain. The world will see."
"Oh my God," Aunt Felicity sobbed. "I didn't mean to—"
"Too late," Cameron said, but his voice was not cruel. "Actions build the future you inherit."
They were punished in public with a kind of slow dismantling that could not be undone with a check. The press arrived, the cameras multiplied, and the people around them recorded while some cried and some clapped, and the moment became a monument to choices that cost more than cash.
For days after, Joelle's name trended in ways that made her want to hide under her bed. Her friends evaporated. Her credit lines shrank. Stores refused to sell her perfume. Her mother—Aunt Felicity—found her accounts frozen and her social invites dry up like a river in drought. Ace Moreau's reputation was shredded. He was barred from his little circuit; the other men who trafficked in cheap misfortune avoided him like poison.
They all watched their calendars shorten in the same way your breath leaves your body when someone closes a door.
"Did we go too far?" I asked Silas one night, when the city was a dim spill of veins.
Silas looked at me as if I had asked whether the ocean was going to stop. "You have no obligation to be merciful," he said. "You have an obligation to be fair."
"Fair?" I smiled, tired. "Is shaming fair?"
"It is a consequence," he said. "They chose it."
The truth was, even as cameras spun their world into smaller and smaller frames, I found it hard not to feel a flicker of something else: a tenderness for the person who had walked out of the hospital with bandaged hands and a life that would be different. James Farrell lived; he rebuilt his company with a steadier hand and a humbler heart. He did not forget the cracks in his life, but he filled them with honest work and better friends. He found someone named Caroline Richardson at a community meeting and she was patient and kind and discreet. They married quietly months later. The world did not end for him. It rearranged.
Aunt Felicity visited James once and left with her silence like an empty purse.
Joelle's birthday had become an elegy. She would spend months on the internet arguing and then begging for kindness. She would see herself on television and wonder if the person on screen was the same as the one who used to hold a stuffed rabbit. She would grow because punishment is a kind of teacher with ugly mannerisms.
The taoist, Ace Moreau, paid in a way that is not measured by money. He could not practice his little trades; his hands trembled every time he tried to light an incense. He lost clients and the other men turned their faces away. He would come to my town months later, asking for small jobs, and I would see in his eyes the shape of a man who had learned a new thing: fear.
I did not revel in their ruin.
"I thought you'd want to use them more," Kylin said to me one night when I sat under the old maple that shaded our yard. "You could have asked for more."
"What would I ask?" I asked. "More houses? More dresses?"
"Protection," Kylin said. "Care for your people."
"I already asked for that," I said. "I asked them to help James. Not to make them suffer like this."
Kylin's whiskers twitched. "There is a balance," she said. "Good and bad. You chose to tip the scales so people would see. They saw. You cannot unsee."
Life thinned out into a pattern after that: school, work on the farm when I went home, quiet dinners with James and Caroline when they invited me. Cameron would send strange little gifts—an umbrella with his company crest, a loaf of bread from a first-run bakery. Maverick would appear at a gallery opening and sign a program with a stamp: For Eleanor, my master and my friend. Silas came by sometimes, less dramatic than before, but just as deep.
"Aren't you going to stay?" Cameron asked once when I returned to the city for a visit. "We have room."
"I like the quiet," I said.
"You could have everything," he said with that half-laugh that makes a man look finally like a boy.
"I don't want everything if everything costs someone else's life," I said.
"Then what do you want?" he asked.
"I want people to be safe. I want my hands clean. I want James to keep his job and Aunt Felicity to find her own truth. I want Joelle to learn. I want the beasts not to be tools."
He looked at me like someone looking at a small lighthouse that refused to flicker. "You always had good judgment," he said.
Kylin folded herself into my lap like a warm stone. "You did well," she said.
"But," I said, because I always have one more question, "why did grandma choose me? Why tie three tremendous beasts to a girl who grows beans and knows how to sew buttons?"
Kylin's eyes were like polished opals. "She knew what you knew," she said. "You are brave enough to refuse easy power."
I thought about that for a long time. Power, I had learned, comes with a ledger. You sign for what you take.
And then one day Kylin curled up on the garden wall and leaped over like a shadow being folded, as if she had somewhere else to be.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"To watch you," she said. "To be with your line."
She hopped on the wall, balanced, and peered at me. "Promise me one thing."
"What?"
"Keep your heart," she said as if it were an old instruction. "It will be easy to spend it. It will be heavier to keep. Keep it."
"I will," I said.
She rubbed her small, foreign face against my palm and launched herself over the fence into the dusk, a white smudge against the sleeping sky.
I stood at the gate until the light folded behind the hills. My life had changed. The city had roared and then softened. People I had loved and people I had barely known had been rearranged by choices that were partly mine and partly the beast's. The world had been given mirror after mirror. Some did not like what they saw.
In the morning I fed the hens and checked the mailbox. I still received messages—some numb, some grateful, some furious.
"You'll come back?" Maverick texted. "We have an extra concert ticket."
"I'll think about it," I typed back.
Cameron called. "I bought a plot of trees," he said. "Planting them for James's company. They will make air and shade."
"I like that," I said.
Silas stopped by the porch with a paper bag of pastries. "Keep an eye on the sky," he said. "Dragons like flying when the wind is good."
"I will," I said, and I meant it because all of it—Cameron kneeling on marble, Maverick laughing into lights, Silas folding himself around promises—felt less like trophies and more like people who had chosen to be near.
Sometimes power requires being big. Sometimes it requires being smaller than you can imagine.
Kylin's shadow cut across the yard like a promise. I watched it go and felt, oddly, like I was exactly where I needed to be. The white cat that had once become a qilin had taught me that guardianship was not about owning magic. It was about choosing when not to use it.
"I will keep my heart," I whispered, to the white sky, to the beasts, to the small map of the world I was learning to live inside.
The wall was quiet, but the night was full of small sounds—crickets, a far-off car, the soft padding of something small hunting moonlight. When I turned back into the house Kylin's whisper brushed my neck like a cool coin.
"Remember," she said, "we are not things."
I tucked that into my pocket like a coin and went to sleep.
The End
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