Wild-born by Adrian Howell Read Free Book Online Page B

I?”
    “What’s a berserker?” I asked.
    Ralph smirked. “He’s the one that was messing with your father’s mind. He’s a controller. The worst kind.”
    “A controller?”
    “That’s right, lad. A controller is a dangerous enemy to make. Some of us can hide, and some can fight, but the real scary ones are them controllers. Especially berserkers. They can make you go psycho, lad. Did it to your father, didn’t he? And look what your father did.”
    I had been looking out the window when he said that, beginning to wonder why I had been so willing to get in this man’s car. I turned to him and shouted furiously, “Shut up about my father!”
    Ralph turned his head to look into my eyes again and said kindly, “Easy there, lad. I’m not disrespecting your father. But if I hadn’t rescued you, you’d be dead too now. That berserker was sent by the Angels.”
    “Angels?” I was having a lot of trouble keeping up with the conversation, and Ralph’s raspy, accented voice wasn’t helping things.
    “They don’t need you, lad,” said Ralph. “That’s why they sent a berserker to kill you. If they wanted you to join them, they would have sent someone nicer, like me, eh?”
    Ralph chuckled at his own joke, but I was even more lost. Every question answered was making things harder to understand.
    “The Angels, see,” Ralph continued in his near-breathless voice, “they’ve got enough destroyers, so they won’t bother with a kid like you. But we don’t want you dead. We want you on our side, to fight the Angels. You aren’t much of a destroyer, but you’re still a destroyer, so maybe you’ll make good cannon fodder.”
    Ralph chuckled again. I wasn’t sure what Ralph meant when he called me a “destroyer,” but I did know what cannon fodder was. Like pawns in a chess game, they were the weakest soldiers that nobody cared about. I didn’t like his joke at all. I glared at him, but he just smiled back.
    “Who knows, lad,” he said lightly, “you might even make a good destroyer someday.”
    I felt a little calmer and said, “Okay. What’s a destroyer?”
    “Why, you’re a destroyer!” laughed Ralph. “You’re a telekinetic. You can break things and you can fight. You can’t heal, you can’t hide, you can’t mess with minds. You’re a destroyer, pure and simple. Maybe you got some other tricks up your sleeves, but the Angels know you’re a destroyer.”
    “That’s why they want me dead?”
    Ralph nodded grimly. “The Angels don’t need you, lad. They’ve got enough better fighters. But they don’t want you joining us either because then someday they’re going to have to fight you. And if they’re going to have to fight you someday, they might as well fight you today, before you get stronger, see?”
    Ralph coughed loudly once, cleared his throat and continued, “Right now they can kill you easy, and if they could kill me too while I was bringing you in, it’d be a bonus. But ha! I killed him, so that’s one less Angel, one less controller, eh?”
    I asked, “So the Angels are the bad guys?”
    Ralph shook his head. “There are no bad guys in this war, lad, because there aren’t any good guys either. It’s just survival, see? For you, it’s just who wants you dead—that’s the Angels—and who wants you alive—that’s us.”
    “Who is ‘us’?”
    “We’re the Guardians,” said Ralph.
    “And you’re at war with the Angels?” I felt I was finally getting somewhere.
    “Well, sure we are. Angels, Wolves, Slayers—you name them, we kill them.”
    “You mean there are people like us everywhere?”
    “People like who, lad?”
    “Like us!” I cried. “People with strange powers!”
    “What? You mean psionics? But of course there are!” said Ralph, chuckling. “What, you thought you were the only one, did you? You thought you were some freak of nature or something? There’ve been people like us since before history was written, lad. How do you think Jesus