Elemental Unity

by Maddy Edwards

  I don’t know when it happened, but at some point sitting in his class also meant leaving the differences between paranormal types behind us. Even Hannah was agreeable in class. She still appeared to have a crush on Keegan, but less so than before.

  Eighellie has also subsided on that front. She was quiet more and more of the time these days. I didn’t know who exactly entertained her fancy anymore. If Averett had ever had any real interest in me, that had also disappeared. I often saw her speaking with other vampires. I knew the pressure of her type weighed heavily on her.

  In fact, the only clear romantic entanglement left was between the fallen angels. Candace and Greek were now avoiding each other like the plague.

  Greek had shown up at the dorm one night to tell me what had happened between them, and it wasn’t good. Candace had confessed her feelings to him while they were in their dorm, and it had gone downhill from there.

  They had known each other since they were little kids, and she had liked him since middle school. She wondered why he never liked her back. He appeared to have crushes on other girls, but never her. She was always his faithful sidekick, someone who was always there but never more than his second or third choice. It was almost worse than being ignored, she told him.

  Unfortunately, she caught him at a bad time. He said so. It sent her through the roof. She had waited long enough for him and the timing wasn’t relevant to her anymore.

  The fact that he didn’t want to talk about it right then told her that he didn’t care enough about her. He didn’t care like she cared, and he always expected her to wait. Well, she was tired of waiting, and she wasn’t going to wait any longer. That’s what she had said.

  That had been after the first Cornerstone. They hadn’t spoken since.

  Greek tried several times to apologize and get her to talk to him, but she was having none of it. She told him that what he had done and not done was entirely unforgivable. He frantically tried to get her to change her mind, but she refused.

  All of this he told me while looking at the floor, never meeting my eye.

  “Do you love her?” I asked him.

  He glanced up and looked uncomfortable. “It’s just that everything is so uncertain, and we’re so young for love. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but once I take up with her, that’s it. We will be done. I always thought she was my forever girl. I’m just not ready for forever right now. I need forever to be a bit shorter.”

  Hopefully he hadn’t phrased it exactly like that to Candace.

  I sort of understood where he was coming from and I sort of didn’t, but I felt entirely certain that Candace did not understand where he was coming from. Not least because he never had the chance to say any of that to her.

  “She accused me of thinking of her like one of our friends. I tell you for a fact, I definitely don’t think about her like that.” He shook his head, scrubbed at his face, and glanced out the window.

  Snow had been falling for the better part of a week. Going forward, that’s all that was in the forecast. Most students were hunkering down in their rooms. Not much was happening around campus. I had been surprised when someone had shown up on my doorstep that night.

  “Would your family approve of her?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Without question. That at least is a sure thing. Her family is almost as old and wealthy and stuck up as mine. Of course all we can do is rival Keller’s family. They really are the worst, although they’ve been taken down a peg since what happened with his aunt. Even they can’t entirely deny what she did. Do you know that they’re still trying to get Lisabelle to reveal where she keeps her?” he asked.

  I was surprised at the change of topic, and I shook my head. “Haven’t been paying attention. I guess it hasn’t been in the news, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “Nobody is surprised. The only surprise would be if Lisabelle agreed to do it. I have a feeling she won’t do any such thing.”

  “I’m sure you two will work it out. You’ve known each other too long to lose your friendship now,” I told him.

  “What if I don’t want to be friends with her anymore?” he asked.

  “I don’t know her like you do, but I would say that if you want more than friendship, you’ll know how to go about getting it,” I said.

  Greek made a face.

  “Haven’t you tried before?” I asked him.

  He gave me a rueful look. “The thing is, I’ve never really had to try before. Girls just come up to me and want me. And that’s about it. We both know I’m not available long-term, so there isn’t a lot to work out.”

  To be fair, that was kind of what Candace had started with. She had told him she loved him. She had done the bulk of the work. The only problem was that she was in fact the girl he cared about, that he might want something with.

  So he had screwed up royally.

  I grinned at my depressed friend with his downcast eyes. “I’m so glad to see that the fallen angels have problems too.”

  The Hellcats amused and delighted themselves for weeks over their victory in the second Cornerstone. They continued to brag about it long after the rest of us started slamming them into walls for it.

  Palmer strutted around as if he owned the school. They even treated Logan like he was an actual paranormal who had assisted in the win as opposed to an expendable joke.

  Classes were the surprising place where I found refuge. The subject matter was demanding and consuming. Without any concerns being openly stated, all of the professors appeared to have decided it was of the outmost importance that students learn how to fight, and they worked hard to that end.

  But they tolerated no fighting in class. When a brawl broke out in Professor Korba’s class, it was quickly broken up. Not once since I started school at Public had I seen Professor Korba lose his cool, and he didn’t bat an eyelash this time, either.

  Instead, when the vampires and fallen angels started fighting, he calmly opened a drawer in his desk. At first I thought I was the only one watching him do it, then I realized that Averett had noticed as well.

  Averett had so far stayed out of the fray between the fighting types, and this dust-up was no exception. When a fallen angel made the mistake of tripping near her feet, she merely looked at him. He broke out into a cold sweat and backed off so fast he ran into a desk. At one point she reached out to pull a vampire friend out of the line of fire. Otherwise she simply sat back with her arms crossed across her chest.

  Meanwhile, Professor Korba pulled a bag the size of my head from his drawer. I felt my eyebrows rise.

  The next instant he shot into the air. The ceiling was high enough, and he was small enough, so that he got above the battle with ease. Then he dumped the entire bag of dust over the fighting students.

  For the next few minutes the entire room was engulfed in haze. I started coughing and tried to get to the wall and out of the way. But whatever Glamour the professor was performing, it wasn’t meant for me.

  The battling students were instantly separated. For extra entertainment, at least from my point of view, their hair turned orange. Neither vampires nor the fallen angels were entertained.

  When Korba had finished, he flew back to his desk, landed on it, and glared around at all of us. “That’s a good lesson in aerodynamics for all of you,” he said with satisfaction.

  When the students who had been fighting groaned, he fixed them with another glare. “I’ll have you know that just because you don’t get along now, that doesn’t mean you won’t need to get along in the future. At some point you’ll have to have each other’s backs. That point may come sooner rather than later. And it might be more important than you think. This stupid infighting when you’re supposed to be learning is doing none of us any good. It doesn’t make you tough and it doesn’t make you smart. It doesn’t get you the girl and it doesn’t make you dinner. Therefore, it has no worth whatsoever. I will not have it in my classroom again.”

  Keegan raised his hand. Profes
sor Korba briefly closed his eyes. “Yes?”

  “If I were doing something to get a girl in class, would it be okay?” he asked.

  “Only if I thought it was going to be successful, which is highly unlikely,” said Professor Korba.

  A round of jeers went up around the room and Keegan’s face turned red. Eighellie covered her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing. Keegan’s eyes went to Averett to see what she made of it.

  The vampire, as usual, was unreadable. Keegan appeared to take some small measure of comfort in that.

  Rake’s class was the most interesting. He had decided to teach us about a special class of powerful glass necklaces that could be filled with others’ magic. From healing magic to darkness magic, the glass could contain any power, but it was also very fragile and had to be treated with the utmost care. The magic couldn’t come from just anywhere, the source was important. Magics contained in the glass would disappear if the glass was broken. Most necklaces of the kind had been broken long ago.

  Magic could rarely be shared across paranormals, but with artifacts it sometimes worked if the paranormal performing the spell did it right.

  Rake never mentioned the Golden Rod in class. What was known as the first artifact was mentioned so rarely in general that I wondered if other students even knew about it. Some did, I was sure, and others didn’t care. But if anybody had any idea how powerful the Hunters would be if they ever got their hands on it, the entire school would have dropped what they were doing to start looking for the Golden Rod until it was found.

  My dorm had become a place to study, and the group who joined me there had grown. The library had been taken over by unpleasant pixies, motivating Greek, Candace, Averett, Ostelle, and my other friends to seek out Astra instead.

  I had wondered after the falling out between Greek and Candace if Candace would continue to come. I had the impression that she hated Eighellie more than ever, but it turned out that she still came to study. She didn’t speak to Greek, but she acted fine around Eighellie. Although Eighellie and Greek had kept in touch over the summer, I didn’t think anything romantic had happened. They were headed toward pretty different life trajectories, after all. Eighellie intended to be an assassin, a life plan that didn’t really leave a lot of opportunity for romance. Greek, on the other hand, would rise in the ranks and lead the fallen angels to a different and better future. That path wouldn’t leave a lot of opportunity to date somebody like Eighellie.

  There had been no discussion with Keegan recently about any crushes he might or might not have on any classmates. If he still had a crush on Averett, he wasn’t talking about it or acting on it. As far as I could see, their affection for each other had cooled to the tepid warmth of a burned up grate. To the extent that Averett cared about anyone at this point, it was other vampires, all the more since the vampires were having more internal problems than some of the other types.

  Averett never talked about those problems with us, though. Or at least not with me.

  I decided that we were all too tired for romantic drama anyway.

  Except for Candace.

  I hoped that before the last Cornerstone of the semester Greek and Candace would have found a way to work out their differences.

  One night when I was all alone in the dorm, Sigil came frantically looking for me.

  “Follow me!!” he bellowed, and sped up the stairs.

  When I caught up with him he was floating around in the library. It was reopened, and the fire was going. Sigil was happy to be there and he rarely left these days. “I don’t like the cold,” he explained.

  “I don’t see how it makes any difference to you,” I muttered.

  “It makes a difference because when I see anybody else cold they make me cold,” he explained.

  “Best to avoid everybody then,” I said.

  “Any luck on your search?” he asked.

  “I’ve been looking for the artifacts on the Counter Wheel all semester,” I said, “but I’ve made no progress. I’ve dug up holes that keep showing up around campus. I don’t know if Hunters have made any progress, but if they’ve found any artifacts at all, then I’m behind where they are. I can’t let them keep finding them,” I said.

  “I’m sure that if they had found the Golden Rod, you would have heard about it,” Sigil said.

  “Maybe so, but what about the others?” I asked.

  Just that morning we had woken up to another hole dug into the earth. Whether an artifact had been found I had no idea. Dobrov was probably going to perform experiments to find out what had been there. Whether he got the answers he was looking for or not, I probably wouldn’t hear about it.

  “What was it that you wanted to tell me?” I asked him, letting my impatience show at last.

  “I think I might have found something on the Counter Wheel,” he said.

  At these words, everything else fell away. The fact that I had to get to Cornerstone soon didn’t matter in the least. The last Cornerstone of the semester be damned. “What do you mean?”

  “Look at this! It was a terribly boring book. But I promised myself I would finish it. I don’t know why I do that to myself sometimes. Sometimes I think life is short and shorter and if I don’t like the book I shouldn’t finish it,” Sigil explained.

  “Get to the point,” I said through gritted teeth, forcing myself not to sidetrack him by pointing out that his “life” was endless.

  “Right. Okay. So the point is I found it. I wasn’t sure it was a map at first. I couldn’t even tell where it was. Then I looked more closely and I realized it was very obvious. It was a map of the school, but it was old. None of the new buildings were on there. On top of that, the forest wasn’t as dense as it is now. It was more open land.

  “On top of that being on top of that, there was an X marking the spot. Very easy to see. Mind you, not a bunch of Xs. I don’t think this is a map to all of the artifacts on the Counter Wheel. Far from it. No, I think it’s something close, though. I think it’s a map to maybe just one of them.

  “But, I actually don’t know that for sure. But then the map was signed. Isn’t that lucky? It’s a map that the Digger made,” he finished proudly.

  I rubbed my temples. “It’s a map to what?”

  “A Cemetery and Buried Treasure. Because that’s what it says at the top. This is the map to a Cemetery and Buried Treasure,” the ghost said, as if by repeating himself he could make it clearer.

  He led me over to a small side table with books and papers scattered all over it. On the top of a pile was an old piece of paper.

  As soon as I looked closely, I knew he was speaking the truth. It was a map of the simpler Paranormal Public of decades ago.

  On top of that, it did have the heading he had quoted.

  I stared at it long and hard. The X he was pointing to was in the woods, further away than Keegan’s treehouse, but still within walking distance of Public.

  I glanced at the ghost. “You know what this means? This might be the first big breakthrough we’ve had,” I said.

  “It might be. I imagine it’s in pretty thick undergrowth at this point. I also imagine that there’s a small risk that Hunters have already gotten into it,” he said.

  I nodded my head. There was a possibility. Then again, this map looked hand-drawn. The Hunters might have only found the artifact if they had searched the woods in the right place by chance, but they certainly hadn’t had their hands on this map.

  “I have Cornerstone tonight. I’ll go there straight after,” I said.

  Sigil beamed at me. “This could really be something. This could give us a chance to fight them. This could give us a chance to win.”

  “Yeah, it could,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On the evening of Cornerstone there was only one element left: water. We hadn’t been told ahead of time how water would be involved, but we all knew it was the only element that hadn’t been used.

  I left Astra in silence. For
once I wasn’t entirely focused on Cornerstone, not after what Sigil had shared with me.

  The usual study crew was with me. Greek had given up on Candace ever speaking to him again. He had lulled himself into a habitual dull silence whenever she came by, whereas before their big fight he had perked up whenever she came around.

  Now he just was angry. For her part, she tossed her hair and didn’t appear to notice, though I had a feeling that underneath the act she did notice, and was hurt.

  Without saying a word, we joined the rest of our team.

  The other groups were there as well. The Hellcats were huddled close, probably plotting something especially evil. They had won the last two Cornerstones and they thought they were on a roll.

  This would be the last competition of the semester. It would say a lot about where we were ending the year, and it would bestow bragging rights that would last all summer. It would give some of us a boost going into finals, and others a blow.

  I stared at the murky water that had been set in place for the competition. Dobrov hadn’t instituted any restrictions against me, at least so far. I felt that I had a the distinct advantage, so I hoped it stayed that way. Then again, the other types had advantages too. Every contest seemed to provide a surprise in that department.

  Dusk had fallen on the spring evening. I couldn’t wait for the semester to be over. I had already decided that I was going to stay at school over the summer and continue to look for the artifacts, but I couldn’t think about that now. It was time to fight.

  “Let’s get this started,” said Palmer, shooting me a vicious look “We need to make sure everyone gets their practice in. And we get our target practice in.”

  “No need to rush to winning,” said one of his companions.

  Palmer’s smile only widened.

  “The rules for tonight are simple,” said Dobrov, silencing the patter. “Stay out of the water. The water is not allowed to move. Once you are forced into the water you are out. The first team to have all of its members forced into the water loses.”