by Gabi Moore
Manipulator of Elements (Y/A Urban Fantasy)
Part 1 - EARTH
Chapter 1
The Fromatius Mall stood at the edge of the parking lot and dominated the countryside around it.
No one seemed to know where the mall had come from; it just showed up one day in the field and sat there empty until the stores began to open. After six months, the mall’s owners held a “Grand Opening” celebration and employed the local marching band and trade guilds to help in the celebration.
Since the trades anticipated a profitable relationship with the mall, they were glad to help out. The schools were thrilled to have a place where the high-schoolers could work during the evenings and weekends. It would be a much better place for them to hang out in than the local Drive-In or bowling alley.
A few people down at the township hall talked among themselves about how quickly the mall had appeared and were stunned it showed up so fast. Although the building plans were submitted and the proper forms filled out, it seemed strange everything went as smoothly as it did when the mall was constructed.
Some of the local firms were hired to do the finishing work and pour the concrete for the sidewalks around the structure, but no one could recall ever seeing the construction firms who were hired to build the mall in town before. And before any of the trade guilds could complain about a lack of their involvement, it was there. As soon as it was constructed, the other trades were contracted and given lucrative contracts to maintain it.
Granted, some of the stores in place seemed a little odd for a suburban shopping mall, but there were enough major retailers in it to defer any bad thoughts from the local suburban moms. Besides, it was spring and people were getting ready for the summer. The big auto plant in the nearby town of Scipio was planning to shut down for two weeks of inventory. This would allow them the chance to make certain they had everything they needed for next year’s models and allow the employees to take vacations. Some employees had additional time in based on years of service and could take as much as two more weeks of vacation. Therefore, if your father or mother were one of the lucky ones to have started working there right after the Korean War, you could spend an entire month at some pleasure dome in Florida.
Lilly Arrad wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Her father ran an insurance company in Fromatius out of their house. Her mother stayed home and took care of her and her older sister when they were coming of age, but now she was looking into a job at the mall. Lilly didn’t want a job at the mall when it opened. She didn’t care for most of the kids she was stuck around all day at her high school and found a job with a catering company. However, most of the jobs her company pulled were at the mall for the various out of town dignitaries who came in to see how their store branches looked and what the sales represented. So, she might as well work at the mall. Perhaps next week’s job would take her somewhere else.
She sat on the hood of her Pinto and looked at the mall again. These things sprang up everywhere. Was the entire country turning into one big shopping mall? The 70’s surely brought with it a lot of novelties. Right now, she could look forward to attending college in the fall at Cincinnati. She had her future mapped out: international studies, find a diplomat, get married and spend the rest of her life throwing parties for foreign dignitaries.
She looked down and sighed.
Her shoes were still in the mall. She’d forgotten them and walked barefoot all the way to the car. She really needed to get beyond that, it was so childish. Now she would have to walk back in that place and get them.
Maybe she wouldn’t. She could drive home barefoot and find her spare sandals in the bedroom closet. She had the dance class tonight her sister taught.
Her sister, Rachel, had learned belly dancing in college and used it to supplement her spending money. Although Rachel married last month and left the house, it still felt as if she was around. With her older sister moved out, Lilly started to feel lonely. She still had a few good friends from the neighborhood, but everyone was headed to different places for college in the fall.
She wanted to stay close enough to come home on the weekend, but far enough to enjoy the life on campus and socialize with the right kind of people. She would be forced to stay in a dorm the first few years, but afterwards, she would find a better place to live. Somehow, the sorority life didn’t appeal to her, and Lilly doubted she would pledge one. She could see herself sharing an apartment after a year or two. Her friend Cindy started college a year early and wrote her letters about how crazy the college dorm life was in Indiana. It was one of her reasons for attending a school in Cincinnati.
The hood of her Pinto started to burn into her butt, so Lilly decided to hop off it and go home. It was early enough in the year to walk barefoot across a parking lot, but she had no desire to go back and retrieve the shoes. They were an older pair and she had more at home. She’d look for them tomorrow. The jeans, on the other hand, were precious. She’d spent the weekend fading them to just the right hue in her mother’s washing machine. They matched the light sweater she wore.
Lilly was small and, at five foot in height, didn’t expect to get much taller. She wasn’t a big eater and kept her weight at a comfortable hundred pounds. She even dieted down to ninety at one point, but didn’t like the way it made her feel. She stayed away from the pot smokers and druggies at her school, although she did enjoy her time on the literary magazine and French Club.
Lilly decided to forget the shoes and turned to open her car door when she saw something.
It was the new guy who transferred into school this year. He was sitting on the edge of the fountain at the entrance. He was staring at it and moving his hand over the water in the pool. The fountain was huge and filled up with coins every day from well-wishers who wanted to bring good luck by tossing three coins in it. But he wasn’t dropping coins in the fountain; he was busy with his eyes fixed on the pattern his hand traced through the air.
Now she was curious.
She finally remembered his name. It was Dion Bacchus. She remembered it because he was in her homeroom. One of the strange things she noticed one day was how many of her close friends had similar names to her last name. The school was huge. Her senior class had five hundred in its enrollment. Not only did the local auto industry contribute to its size, but the regional air force base added to it as well. It wasn’t unusual for her to call a friend’s house and have a “Colonel Adams” answer the phone.
Dion started school that year as a transfer student from some place in California that year, but mostly kept to himself. She had said little more than “hello” to him since he started. It was strange to see someone start school in their senior year and he didn’t seem to interact with anyone. Dion’s locker was two sections down from her, but Lilly seldom saw him speak to anyone. He was in her biology class as well, but she couldn’t ever recall him asking a single question.
This was too bad for Dion because plenty of the girls at school were obsessed with him.
He stood almost six foot tall, had dark features and black eyes with hair that cascaded down his back to a school-acceptable length. He wore the standard jeans and t-shirt apparel, which dominated in the school, but had an intense look on his face and a tight set of chest muscles that showed through his shirt.
A few girls approached him one day and, although he was polite, he didn’t speak very long with any of them. A few of the local tough kids who were into drugs and hard rock tried to corner him in the hall one day. He took the hand of one and gently pulled it off him. The kid who placed it there walked away swearing under his breath with a look of pain in his eyes. Lilly remembered the tough one later coming to school with his hand in a cast.
Rumors abounded about Dion’s background.
He lived with his aunt and uncle in one of the nicer houses on a good street, but people seldom saw him leave the house. The rumor most people believed was that his real parents died in some kind of tragic accident and his relatives were the only ones who
could take him in. Some said his family were foreign spies, others said they were extraterrestrials who were under the protection of the air base. Among other things, the base was rumored to hold the bodies of aliens who’d crashed on Earth in a flying saucer. Some people believed Dion’s family were all black magicians who sacrificed goats in the back yard, although no one had ever seen it take place. The house where he dwelled was quiet and never gave the neighbors any reason to be concerned about what happened over there.
There were plenty of other strange things that happened in the neighborhood over the past few years, such as the professor of chemistry who was busted for making illegal pharmaceutics in his basement. The man later turned out to be deeply in debt to mobsters.
“I wondered why he always was on the pay phone at the grocery store,” Lilly’s mother had said to her when the arrest hit the news.
Since the fountain stood between her and the entrance to the mall, Dion would be directly in her path if Lilly wanted to go back in it for her shoes. This would allow her to see what he was up to by the fountain and retrieve her shoes at the same time. You weren’t supposed to enter the mall if you didn’t have shoes on, but she didn’t worry about it, as Lilly knew some of the mall security guards. They were constantly flirting with her.
She checked to make sure her car was locked before she picked up her leather purse and headed back into the mall.
The day was bright and sunny with birds circling in the sky. She looked up and realized the birds were vultures. It was an unnerving sight; what interest would vultures have in a mall? She decided they were riding the air currents drifting up from the ground. People believed vultures circled in the air to signal each other when there was something dead on the ground. But Lilly learned years ago it had to do with the way they used the updraft from warm air on the ground to glide. There might be places on the roof where the vultures nested. They weren’t all that far from Hinckley, Ohio where they returned every year to mate and nest. Perhaps the vultures were thinking about moving their nesting grounds to the mall?
The mall was dominated by a huge clock, which sat in the middle and towered over everything below it. Although the mall was an indoor shopping center, someone had decided it needed a clock tower rising up from the center of the complex so everyone in the parking lot could see what time it was. Access to the clock tower was almost impossible to find, or so she’d been told by a few friends whose parents worked in the mall. Even the plans approved by the local building committee were vague on this part of the mall construction.
Lilly walked past the fountain where Dion sat on the ledge. Something compelled her to stop and watch what he did with his hand. She froze when she saw a small column of water rise into the air close to his hand and fall. She stood there in amazement as he brought an entire wave of water up to his level and watched as it fell down into the pool. No one else was around the fountain at this time of the day.
As she stood there, Dion slowly turned around and aimed his piercing eyes into her own. Lilly felt as if her entire soul was bared to him. It seemed Dion could see into her very mind and knew everything about her. But she wasn’t scared. She didn’t feel any sort of animosity from Dion… just curiosity.
As he looked at her, two more columns of water rose into the air and slowly fell back down into the fountain. They were followed by a wave, which rose up to his height and sent a shower of coins into the air. The coins splashed back into the water as he continued to watch her. Dion kept one hand in the air over the fountain, but never once did the water come near him. She could see no dampness or watermarks on his clothes.
“How did you do that?” she asked him.
“Do what?” Dion said, withdrew his hand to one side of his body and rested it on the ledge of the fountain.
“The water… you had it moving and forming shapes in the air. I’ve never seen anyone do that. Are you some kind of magician?”
Dion smiled back at her. “You mean an illusionist, like Houdini or Copperfield? No, not like that. Not at all.”
He moved his hand over the water and a mist rose over it. As Lilly froze in place, she saw the mist form into a cloud over the fountain. The clouds turned into fantastic shapes. One became the figure of a dancer before it broke apart in the air. Another one turned from a boat into a dragon before a breeze blew it apart.
Dion lowered his hand and the mist over the fountain dissolved.
“Can I sit by you?” Lilly asked him. She trembled. This was the sort of thing that never happened. At least not to people like her.
“Of course, you can sit right here.” He indicated the space to his right.
Lilly’s feet took her to the fountain and her body sat itself down next to the strange man. Now that she was close, Lilly could see how handsome he was. She always felt Dion was cute, but this close she could sense the heat radiating from him and really felt his presence. Her heartbeat increased and she tried to avoid showing the sweat forming on her brow.
“Can I see your lighter?” he asked her.
How did Dion know she had a lighter in her purse? People didn’t smoke as they had in her parents’ day. Then it hit her: if he knew she had a lighter in her purse, he might know what else she had in it. With shaking hands, she opened the clasp on her leather purse and took out the cigarette lighter.
Her hand still trembling, Lilly handed it to Dion and placed her purse down. She hadn’t felt so vulnerable since an old boyfriend told her over the phone one night his parents had installed a hot tub in their backyard and they would be gone for the weekend.
Dion flicked the flint on the lighter and a flame popped out of one end. He held it up for a few seconds and watched the flame burn.
“I don’t think they want you to smoke out here,” she told him.
“Who said anything about smoking,” he said and held out the burning lighter in front of her.
Lilly watched as the flame grew to a height of what must’ve been about six inches. She didn’t believe it was possible for this to happen. The lighter couldn’t have that much fuel in it. The flames changed shapes, turned blue and became a human form. As her eyes grew wide, she watched the shape detach from the ground and run circles on the concrete. She saw the little figure made from fire run a figure eight in front of them for a few seconds. Then it stopped and seemed to look up at them. Two seconds later, it was gone in a puff of smoke.
“They just don’t last very long,” he explained as Dion returned the lighter back to her.
In front of the fountain was a small strip of grass that encircled it. At one time, the landscapers intended to plant flowers there, but the mall management decided against it. They reasoned it would deter people from enjoying the fountain and the flowers would be trampled. They left the strip where a few feet of grass grew and needed to be trimmed every year.
Dion reached down and picked up some dirt. It was moist from the recent rains and he kneaded it into the shape of a heart. He placed the dirt heart down on the ledge of the fountain between them and washed his hands in the fountain. The heart turned red and then formed into a crystalline pattern. Seconds later, it became a brilliant and shiny piece of onyx.
“Wow. Can I pick it up?”
“Go ahead.”
Lilly reached down and picked up the onyx heart. It was solid when her fingers made contact, but by the time it was up to the level of her face, the onyx was dirt again. As she looked at it, the glossy black became brown and crumbled in her hands.
“Doesn’t last very long either,” he told her. “I’m working on it.”
“How does this happen?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” He looked at her with an intensity she’d seldom seen before.
“I mean, you have to have some tricks to make those things appear to move, don’t you? My sister told me about a man at a bar who pulled all kinds of coins out of her nose and ears. She told me he showed her how he did it later.”
“Oh, that,” he laughed. “You mean this sort o
f trick?” Dion held out a quarter and waved his hand in front of her. “Give me your hand,” he commanded.
Lilly held hers out and felt his strong fingers hold it from the other side.
He took the hand with the quarter in it and dropped two quarters into her palm. She looked up at him, her lip-gloss shining in the sunlight. Lilly was glad she hadn’t worked the green eye shadow today.
“This is what I did,” he explained to her. Dion proceeded to show Lilly the method by which he’d hidden the first quarter behind the second and only held up one to her face. When he opened his hand, two had fallen into her palm because she’d been deceived and only saw one.
“It appears so simple,” Lilly told him. “But I still can’t figure out how you made the water rise, or the fire dance.”
“Different kinds of talent,” he told her. “One is based on deception; the other comes from the elements. One fools you; the other is from destiny. It just so happens my destiny was to shape the genius of the elementals.”
“Are you saying it’s something you’re born with?”
“We all have our talents. Some of us have to work a lot harder at them than others. At least that is what my dad told me. My aunt can’t make it happen, but my uncle can. What you see here…” he waved a hand over the fountain and another column of water rose up to it. He shook his hand and the column fell back, “…is talent, but not much. I was supposed to learn the rest of it from my father, but he’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Lilly said. She felt her heart race. If he reached out for her now, Lilly didn’t know what she’d do. Damn the talk her mother gave her last month and the one she’d had with her former boyfriend. Her eyes were starting to cloud over.
“They are both alive,” he told her. “I know everyone at school think they’re dead. But they’re very much alive.”
“Then why do you stay with your aunt and uncle?”
“Protection,” he explained. “The same person who kidnapped them wants me as well. My aunt and uncle can stand up to that person. Alone, I can’t. I’m not strong enough… yet. But when I am, I’ll get them back. But not until I’ve reached my full strength.”
